Maybe it's because in reality cashless is easy compared to clean water and no pollution for masses?

Cashless is also not desired by Americans, many of whom like cash. Stores are fine with taking it (no transaction fees after all), there are zero privacy concerns, and counterfeiting is not really a problem.

Cash doesn't have direct transaction costs, but:

- it needs to be manually reconciled at the start/end of each shift

- staff can steal it

- robbers can steal it

- it takes time to count out change (and to ensure you have enough small bills and coins)

- it takes time to deposit it at the bank

- it costs money to deposit it at the bank (even if Walmart is ok accepting cash for an iPad, I'm guessing Apple requires Walmart to pay by bank transfer)

I'm not sure about the US situation but, the last time I checked, UK banks charged 0.3%-0.5% for accepting a cash deposit from a business customer.

Yes, cash can be stolen, but cards are much more dangerous to your privacy: bank knows where you go and what you buy, it can sell this information to anyone (of course, with hashing your phone number with military-grade algorithm to protect your personal data), shops know who you are and can exchange information about your purchases along with model of your face taken by the camera at the register, MAC address of your phone's WiFi module and car plate number (of course hashed with military-grade algorithm to protect your privacy).

Also, in some countries it is very easy to lock person's bank account even without a trial, for example if person is suspected in financing terrorist or extremist organisation.

Also new cards have RFID chip in it and it can be used for example to get information about people going through the doors.

'Some countries' meaning Russia

Square recently released an infographic that supports this:

https://squareup.com/us/en/making-change

(I work for square but wasn’t involved with this project)

Never understood that. Living in the UK for example you never have to cary bills. Light wallet, so much more practical, I hate places that only accept cash.

What if every store accepted both cash and cards?

I'd be fine with this as long as you don't have to pay a fee if you're not paying cash (which is often a thing for small shops).

Unfortunately this is not the world we're living in :) it's often both cash and cards OR just cash. Berlin is a really good example of that, you always need cash on you which tricks the many tourists who come from countries were cash is not really a thing anymore.

The credit card companies make the merchant pay a fee for using credit cards - so it's not the shop's fault. That's another reason why cash is alive in America.

The bigger reason is to avoid taxes. If it’s paid with card, taxes have to be paid, and with cash, the merchant can make an extra 30%+ by not declaring it.

Cashless means lack of tracking. Naturally, a surveillance state wants a non-cash society.

I met a guy who said he lived in Shenzhen a while, and said that J-walking would get you an automatic deduction from your wechat pay account, assuming you were in front of a camera.

Let me turn that around for you. Would you like it if people who turned or changed lanes without indicating were reliably and automatically fined? Because I sure would.

The law is the law. If it's a good law, then its efficient, universal, automatic enforcement should be a good thing. If not - then it's the law that needs to be changed. You're complaining about the enforcement - but what you actually don't like is the law itself.

Hell, maybe efficient and automatic enforcement will force us to confront bad laws, rather than relying on discretion at the enforcement stage to water them down tolerably. Better they not be on the books at all.

No I would not like that automatic fine. In theory okay, but in reality it's foolish to separate enforcement from what is being enforced. Moxie explained this well. In short, good luck changing that law.

https://moxie.org/blog/we-should-all-have-something-to-hide/

There is a position between yours and sho's.

Sure, if every federal crime were enforced through automatic fines, this could be a mess due to the complexity of the law.

But what's your objection to a fine for changing lanes without indicating?

I had no objection to that fine. I had an objection to the an automatic mechanism to do it, or to perfectly enforce any law, no matter how trivial, Simply because these kinds of things don't happen in a vacuum; the mechanisms built toward these ends will not be limited to being used toward that one end. For example maybe there's cameras everywhere to enforce this law. But then there's cameras everywhere. I highly recommend that article I linked if you have not read.

Edit 1: I realized what you meant with your question so disregard the first sentence. Edit 2: Also, it's worth stating that it follows that these concerns are completely independent of the complexity of the law.

What if someone were to devise a mechanism to detect and prosecute people changing lanes without indicating, with the following properties?

- perfect accuracy (no FP; no FN)

- automated enforcement via a fine, without knowing the identity of the perpetrator (just assume it's possible; I know it's hard)

- no potential for the device or underlying technology to be used or repurposed for any other form of surveillance or enforcement

Would such a system (and automated enforcement) be OK?

> Would such a system (and automated enforcement) be OK?

Yes. But as you pointed out, `automated enforcement via a fine, without knowing the identity of the perpetrator` is hard.

And as others have pointed out, Point 1 and Point 3 are also difficult to accomplish.

Question for you is, are you okay for the government to roll out a mechanism to detect and prosecute people changing lanes without giving you any guarantee of respecting the 3 points you mentioned above?

If your answer is no, you are not okay with it, then we are all on the same side.

If your answer is yes, then you should read the article above by moxie (very interesting article)

We mostly agree.

I'd be happy to compromise a bit on point 1. I could accept a high (20%) false negative rate. If the fine were small enough then I'd be OK with a small number of false positives (as long as they're randomly distributed, not hammering one person who happens to live near a faulty camera).

I wouldn't want to compromise on point 2 or 3, particularly for this example (catching impolite drivers).

But what if the example were about a highly accurate system for detecting kidnappers or people traffickers or something? It seems harder for me to argue against enforcement on the grounds of privacy or slippery slope.

> what if the example were about a highly accurate system for detecting kidnappers or people traffickers or something?

That is always the argument for total surveillance state. In Singapore, crime rates are close to 0, but to be effective it means no privacy and everybody is monitored. I'm not okay with this.

What about unique circumstances? Say a child or an animal ran out in the road and you changed lanes to avoid them but didn't have time to signal. Or any one of a hundred of these unique but not uncommon situations.

Would there be a mechanism in place to remove your fines and points? Would that system be automated? Would it be susceptible to lying? How long would it take to get the record corrected? Would the effort cost more than the fine?

Just from a technical/automated point of view, removing the moral and societal aspects, the real world is currently just way to complex and ambiguous to automate things like this.

With perfect enforcement, the fine could be small enough (e.g. $2) to be insignificant for most of us (maybe I need to swerve around an animal once per year) but significant enough to deter persistent offenders (who would rack up $20 in fines per journey).

what about someone making $50 / day? Lets imagine you are making just enough to get by and now government wants to roll out an automatic way to take money from your account for minor infractions. How unhappy would you be?

Also on a side note: "...the fine could be small enough (e.g. $2) to be insignificant for most of us..." -> I once said something like that to someone and he pointed out that statements like that was very hurtful to hear, especially coming from someone who does not understand his financial struggles.

No. It would only be ok if we rework the whole idea of law, base it not in tradition, but perfect rationality and objectiveness. Consider this: i change lanes at 2 a.m. on an empty road. There's no objective need to signal. I get fined for not signalling. I do 50 in a 30 zone (because there's a school nearby) at the same time. I get fined even though there's no objective reason for it. And these are simple examples, if we get to complex cases of, let's say, self defense, it opens up a major can of worms.

In your first example, you could just change your behaviour to signal even when you think no one is around (as I do).

Your second example (speeding) doesn't incur a fine because in this hypothetical example the automated enforcement is only used for signalling violations.

For your third example (self defence), maybe you are forced to change lanes without signalling. How often? Once per year? What if the fine were $2, and people like you had to pay it once per year, but people who persistently refuse to signal end up paying 1000s of $2 fines per year?

Seems like a reasonable trade-off.

In the first example, the idea is that the primary function of blinkers is to convey information. The law makes it mandatory to transmit that information with presumption that the information will be processed by human beings you are sharing the road with. If there are no humans around, the transmission of this information is meaningless and therefore should not be mandatory. If the road is used by autonomous vehicles which transmit information about their paths via radiowaves, signalling could be obsolete as well. The most important part in law is the underlying idea of the social agreement which is being enforced by it and reasonabless of the law (and enforcement).

My point is that by automating fine dispensaries, you are subversing the underlying idea itself (automatron can't know what or why is it enforcing) and reasonability.

Maybe, but I expect such a thing is unrealistic enough to not really be worth spending energy discussing. In the same way that exploring "what if state actors were totally benevolent and always would be" wouldn't really be fruitful. I'm not even an anti-government person or whatever; it's just realpolitik.

I totally agree with the article you linked? Bad, overreaching laws, discretionally enforced, are a very bad thing and open the door to huge abuses of power?

You sound like you think you're arguing with me but I agree!

I doubt GP is complaining about the law itself. The question is always more about humans, systems, corruption, and power. Omnipresent surveillance is incredibly powerful, frighteningly so. And we all know human systems are corrupted over time. The question is, can an all powerful corrupt human system be overturned?

I'd like it if cars would take less space, and would give the right of way to pedestrians jay walking anywhere. Fuck cars.

Oh come on. Pollution is highly localised. Yeah, there's a few bad cities but it's a big place and 99% of it is fine. And no clean water, really? That will be news to the billion plus inhabitants who haven't realised they're dead yet from lack of clean water, sixth sense style.

Nit picking aside - that surveillance state is maybe 5 years ahead of the west. I'm continually amazed that western governments have allowed strongly encrypted private communications to become a thing, even an expectation - this is totally unprecedented and a radical upset to the balance of power between the state and its citizens. I expect it's only a matter of time before strong end to end encryption is totally banned in the west, too.

How many native Chinese do you know who drink tap water? Almost all I know either drink bottled water or only hot, boiled tap water.

As for pollution, only 84 out of 338 cities reached the national standard for air quality [1]. That's not exactly "a few bad cities". The government has been working on improving it, but they still have a long way to go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_in_China#Air_polluti...

> Almost all I know either drink bottled water or only hot, boiled tap water

100% of them drink boiled tap water. But isn't this proving my point? Not like it's poisoned with heavy metals?

As for pollution, of course they have a long way to go, but the dystopian picture you paint is hardly fair. It's not perfect but you make it sound like Blade Runner 2049. It's not. I live in Bangkok right now and it is WAY worse than Shenzhen or Shanghai. But I never hear Thailand invoked in one of these "pollution hell" threads.

Look, what you said isn't technically incorrect but your level of hyperbole irked me. I always come across as defending China or something in these threads but I'm not really, I just want it to be fact based. China is not THAT bad. Yes, I know a lot of Chinese people, and they express no pressing desire to leave. It is very far from the worst place on earth to live.

> 100% of them drink boiled tap water. But isn't this proving my point?

No, it's exactly disproving your point, or at least strong evidence against it. To be explicit: if 100% drink boiled tapwater then 100% feel pollution is present which strongly suggests pollution isn't localised.

As for introducting heavy metals, you're trying to fudge the issue: pollution may include, but is not limited to, heavy metals.

> I always come across as defending China or something

I take your point and will accept you're arguing in good faith, but a sloppy post like this simply undermines yourself.

We drink boiled water just because we like it warm. It's part of the culture. It's also one of the reasons why there are few epidemics when natural disaster strikes.

The tap water quality varies from place to place, but it's generally good enough, granted it is not as good as the first world countries such as the US or Japan or much of the Europe, but after all we are still a third world country.

We are a surveillance state and it's worth discussing and condemning in every aspect, but talking about tapped water just dilutes the topic.

Well put. It's true a lot of the negative stuff here isn't technically incorrect, but the hyperbole certainly has a distorting effect on the conversation. Clearly, discovering negative aspects about China serves some kind of convenient narrative. I suspect it's something to do with China's growing power, which is threatening to the hegemony the so-called West has exploited for the last few centuries. Reading between the lines the story is something like, "yeah China is growing but it's not real because pollution, human rights, surveillance, etc - anybody could grow like that if they took shortcuts like them". Which I suppose ultimately is a subconscious projection of the guilt the West feels about the shortcuts it took.

> It's true a lot of the negative stuff here isn't technically incorrect

Then it's correct, yes?

> China serves some kind of convenient narrative

I have to agree. If china were an economically unimportant tiddler or have lotsa oil, the west wouldn't care nearly as much.

> the so-called West has exploited for the last few centuries

And china had a pretty repressive feudal government for a very long time. That is, the pyramid's peak freely and often brutally exploited the pyramid's broad base. For a very long time. And Uighurs - like to comment on them? Perhaps you'd like to list some chinese atrocities here?

Seriously, list some.

I'm aware and not proud of the opium wars. That shit should be taught in school, as well as the way brits treated the irish, the welsh, the scottish... Not as a guilt thing but as a way of saying, let this not happen again.

> 100% of them drink boiled tap water. But isn't this proving my point? Not like it's poisoned with heavy metals?

Clearly not 100%. Not a huge fan of these random percentages haha. And we don't know if the tap water isn't poisoned with heavy metals. The effects aren't immediate so it's not like locals would necessarily notice. There's at least one source that claims they are indeed poisoned with heavy metals [0]

> As for pollution, of course they have a long way to go, but the dystopian picture you paint is hardly fair. It's not perfect but you make it sound like Blade Runner 2049. It's not. I live in Bangkok right now and it is WAY worse than Shenzhen or Shanghai. But I never hear Thailand invoked in one of these "pollution hell" threads.

I dunno man, Shanghai on a bad day is pretty comparable to Blade Runner. When I go to China, I get a headache, my mouth tastes metallic and I definitely have a reduced lung capacity. Also, I was actually impressed by Bangkok's lack of pollution. Maybe I caught it at a lucky time, but the air was very refreshing compared to Wenzhou. Even right now, the air forecast is decent [1] compared to Wenzhou [2] or Shanghai [3].

China is definitely not the worst place to live, but it's dramatically different from most western countries. In most western countries, you can talk about Winnie the Pooh without getting banned, while enjoying a nice refreshing glass of tap water :D.

[0] https://www.purelivingchina.com/blog/what-pollutants-are-chi... [1] https://aqicn.org/city/bangkok/ [2] https://aqicn.org/city/wenzhou/ [3] https://aqicn.org/city/shanghai/

> Clearly not 100%. Not a huge fan of these random percentages haha

Well, frankly, most Chinese I know will boil their water regardless of where they live. They do it in Australia and Singapore as well. Cultural norm?

I guess I'm not invested enough in the argument to dig up actual water pollution statistics but I'd be pretty surprised if Shanghai water was actually toxic.

> Shanghai on a bad day is pretty comparable to Blade Runner

I guess I've missed those days. I know Beijing can be hellish but most of my China experience is down south. I've never been to Wenzhou but I know Shenzhen very well and I can categorically tell you that air pollution in Bangkok is worse.

But look. The whole point of my comments has been to not generalise local data points to a whole country. As other commenters have mentioned, you can't drink the tap water in Flint, Michigan either - and that's in the so-called richest country on earth. LA smog is awful too. But that's just those places. The USA is huge. So is China.

As for Winne the Pooh - that's ridiculous. I read a good quote the other day: "the nation that is afraid of humiliation will soon humiliate itself" and I agree 100%. I'm not trying to defend China. I'm just trying to defend fact.

Your “few bad cities” also contain 24.5/40.0 million (Shanghai), 22.5 million (Beijing), 19.8/44.3 million (Guangzhou), 15.5/16 million (Tianjin), 15.4/25.2 million (Chongqing), 14.7 and 18 million (Chengdu), 12.4 million (Shenzhen), 10.7/19.8 million (Wuhan) and 10.0/21.1 million (Hangzhou).¹ China is 58% urbanised.² Most of the land area of China is not as polluted as Shanghai, that is true; but disproportionately many people live in those areas—which is unsurprising, because pollution is often due to high population density. (Pollution per capita is of coursed generally reduced by density, but that is another matter.)

1. see the Wikipedia page for largest cities in China

2. Yiping XIAO, Yan SONG and Xiaodong WU, “How Far Has China’s Urbanization Gone?”, in: Sustainability 10.8 (Aug. 2018), p. 2593, DOI: 10.3390/su10082953

> there's a few bad cities but it's a big place and 99% of it is fine

http://maps.who.int/airpollution/

>That will be news to the billion plus inhabitants who haven't realised they're dead yet from lack of clean water, sixth sense style

People in places like Flint aren't dead either.

They've organised alternate supplies - as have any Chinese who don't trust the local water. As you would expect.

I'm glad you mentioned Flint though. I assume most Americans here know about Flint's issues - but they realise the USA is a big place and that's only one town. Well, China's a big place too. Yeah, it can improve, a lot. But this godforsaken hellscape that people seem to imagine all the time is just not real.

Strongly encrypted private communications are already effectively banned in Australia.

That sounds like San Francisco. I don't recognize Boston in that.

It's hilarious to me how many people from San Francisco think America revolves around their overpriced 47 square mile peninsula.

Just recently I noticed that non-Californians on HN now know what it feels like to read English-language internets while not being from the US.