Do you know what happens the first moment there's anything that resembles a disaster... All the water gets bought up, because no one bothers being prepared.
Your average gas station gets gas delivered once a day (or more). Gas delivery stops, were screwed pretty quick.
The point being, the world is far far more brittle than anyone understands.
Recently we had this: https://codeofmatt.com/list-of-2024-leap-day-bugs/ So a day for a grocery chain in Sweden and a gas station chain in New Zealand.
For me "There is a 3 out of 4 chance of a damaging earthquake in the Bay Area in the next 30 years." From: https://www.earthquakeauthority.com/blog/2020/san-francisco-... Is this a week of no power (so no cc's, no atm, no cell service).
A cornal mass ejection has 1 in 194 odds, is it bad enough that it's a grid killer? I don't know what the odds are for that (as in having EMP), and its gonna be fun if we see it coming to!
A major payment processor failing, or payment network failing for a few days is possible. What happens when a grocery chain is open and suddenly "cash only". It has happened before.
You dont need a big, or national event where social order is maintained but cash is essential to keeping things moving.
The point at which the only way of transacting is through cash during the duration of this outage.
We get one of these regionally ever decade or so. Go back another (few) decade and weeks of no power in upstate NY (dairy farmers working with the amish to hand milk cows... people are resourceful). As a kid 3-4 days without power post hurricane wasn't a big deal. If plastic can't pay for things, I think it's gonna get ugly pretty quick, keep some cash around the house is a good policy.
Like some bad weather? I'd argue that accurately describes swathes of Texas just a few years ago. Some areas lost power for days.
Next, it can't light the store. In mid-summer you can probably use the parts of the store with some natural light for most of the day, the rest of the store is too dark to allow customers, as is the behind the scenes re-stocking etc., they also can't open the delivery bays which are electrically shuttered, and they can't operate the doors, the escalators or the elevators.
Now, I live in a major port city, so obviously in reality the power isn't going to stay off here, not for days, at home I've had a handful of short (< 2 hour) outages and one serious (~4-8 hour) outages in maybe 30 years living in this city. Anywhere with multiple supplies or backups is going to have even less problems.
I can buy that things are different in rural areas, but it seems to me that mostly you need backups for other reasons anyway, and both electricity and IP are great in those terms because they're so fungible compared to conventional backups.
In the cash scenario, customers who have cash in hand can buy stuff; now the store is running low on goods, but they have a pile of money in a safe. So they need to take that money to a wholesaler to buy more goods to sell.
If they sell a bunch of goods for digital payments, the money’s all sitting in their online account. When they want to restock they can pay the wholesaler digitally and have stuff delivered.
It’s almost like there’s a reason we invented banks.
In this scenario, why would I trade the food which I need now for cash? I don't care about a potentially large payoff in the future when my immediate needs are not met.
Are you saying that you would not give anyone else food?
So you accept that no one else will give you food?
Basically all transactions should stop?
Or are you saying that transactions should not bother being counted. Everyone just takes what they say they need wherever they can find it?
What is the guiding argument or thesis here?
Imagine the point at which my neighbour is willing to riot for food. That means his neighbour is also likely willing to riot for food and so on and so forth. This also means I'm likely willing to riot for food. I am not trading my last couple of meals of which I don't know when I'll get for a thousands or even hundreds of thousands dollars.
The point is if it gets bad enough that people immediate needs are not met, cash or money means very little. No matter how much of it you have, if you are at the point where you're rioting for food, there is likely not enough food for you or your neighbour who also doesn't know when they'll get their next meal.
Do you think there will exist a point at which a person would much prefer food in their hand than even larger sums of cash? My point is that when a food riot occurs is when cash becomes worth less than food.
Having cash means you'll be one of the people buying food that weekend, and not stuck in line at ATMs or simply unable to purchase food until the card system comes back online.
Maybe you need plywood and tarps and a few people to help. Maybe your workplace was flattened, but there's plenty to do - I'd rather get cash at the end of the day than a bunch of canned goods, unless I'm truly out of food and it's truly scarce.
I can use that cash for other things like fuel, or stuff that was lost because my house was flattened.
But in a scenario where people are desperate enough to riot for food, there will likely be shortages of other stuff, too. I'd assume it's more intuitive and fair to convert fuel-to-dollars and dollars-to-bread than fuel-to-bread, or days-wages-to-soup, which is the whole point of money anyway.
What odds would you give me of something like this happening over the course of next ten or even hundred of years? That scenario in which people are bartering for resources is a scenario in which power has been lost for multiple weeks in the United States? The odds you should be giving me is on the order of millions or tens of millions, at least.
A fender bender can mess up your day or weekend plans just as much as a 200-car pileup of flaming hazmat trailers - and the minor events occur far more frequently.
Well, 100% certainty since it has happened within the decade.
In reality you have personnel which shows a deep frown if the till says 42.52 and you give them 50 in bills, and 2.52 in coins, so they can give you an even 5 and 3 or 2 coins back. (adapt to your local currency and coinery)
You can hear their mental scream "Oh my gawd! Aye need to calculate! Ze horror!"
Fuel? With no electricity? Hand pumped? Somewhere far out in fly-over-county maybe.
But most places I've lived seem to have plenty of non-IoT cash registers, and it's not infrequently that something is wrong with their card system, EBT is down, etc. That the financial district Sweetgreen won't be able to take my money is a risk I'm willing to assume.
It's a much bigger deal when you're walking (or in rural America) and are faced with an hour+ trek to another store (or pay $3.75 to get $20 out, assuming the ATM works). I've also had unexpected overdrafts that affect only my account, and having a couple hundred to a thousand-some dollars of cash in my house has saved me numerous times.
Fuel options with no electricity do in fact involve talking to some guy named Jim Bob, Buddy, or Mack, who is gonna want cash or raccoon pelts, not more canned goods or bread (he has plenty already, and I'm all out of raccoon pelts).
Which brings me back to my original point: in any real catastrophic event, it's going to be other random people you're dealing with, not the IoT devices of faceless corporations. And most are not gonna want to negotiate raccoon pelts to fuel oil (or gold shavings, for that matter).
Because then you pay cash, to state the obvious.
Even here in silicon valley the local convenience stores every so often have a sign that they're only taking cash today because their network/computer/payment-processor is down right now.
No big deal, pay cash.
The problem for a society that worships efficiency and convenience is that security feels like a luxury too expensive to maintain. That becomes a rationalisation to say things like "that will never happen". Or psychological 'splitting' ; "If the power goes off we're all screwed anyway, so why even try to prevent needless massive loss of life as an interim posture"
> Modern power infrastructure is incredibly resilient and outages
I'm sorry but you've been exposed to wishful thinking. I've a masters degree on my desk from an MoD student who did a thesis on black start and lockout scenarios as part of national security research (sorry I am unable to share it but you can dig up the same stuff from any published civilian university these days). I don't wish to be alarmist but there is a great deal to be concerned about and a great amount our governments and engineers need to do to secure things here in the UK and in the US.
So what’s happening there? Reversion to a cash economy?
Not really.
> In 2023, most card-based transactions in Ukraine were cashless despite the full-scale war... cashless card-based transactions accounted for 65% of the total amount of card-based transactions last year, up from 61% in the pre-war year 2021.
https://bank.gov.ua/ua/news/all/drugiy-rik-povnomasshtabnoyi...
> In Ukraine, digital payments have become mainstream with 60% of payments with Mastercard cards being made digitally today, ... For five years running, Ukraine has ranked among the top 10 countries worldwide at Mastercard by the number of NFC payments using digital cards.
https://www.mastercard.com/news/eemea/en/perspectives/en/202...
I'm wondering if they meant 'contactless'. That would fit with the other concept. As long as the infrastructure is up, they may prefer contactless or mobile pay, but what do they use when the infrastructure to accept ANY card is down?
I understand the European chip model is slightly more resilient in this regard-- the idea of not being able to get a live authorization is a little more baked in, and you can fall back to "we expect to settle the transactions a few hours or a day or two later" concerns. I suspect the standard practices go out the window for a long term siege.
Just get the Tories out and you can get an energy system where almost every bit has trivial black start capability, there's no technical reason why it'll be a problem in a renewable dominated system (and that's ESO's word, project Distributed ReStart).
Also, it's funny you say "greatest respect" when your opening was "you have to be mentally challenged to disagree".
This comes across as a very sheltered view I have to say.
Modern systems are very fragile, as they get ever more complicated combined with less and less appetite by utilities to spend on redundancy and disaster preparedness (cuts into profits).
> In this scenario where people are desperate to do a food riot, a power outage has occurred for multiple consecutive days if not at least a week.
In 2017 hurricane Maria left Puerto Rico without power for many weeks (in many areas) and multiple months (in some parts) (or even a few years in most remote areas). Society goes on, but you'll be well served to have cash.
While that was a major hurricane, electricity outages of like a week are quite common with smaller storms.
In this scenario where people are desperate to do a food riot, a power outage has occurred for multiple consecutive days if not at least a week. In which case, something truly apocalyptic is happening, in which case I doubt people would be civilized enough to bargain for food for useless cash or shavings of gold, in that scenario resources are the only useful 'cash'. In this scenario, it's likely it'd be some sort of national emergency and I'd imagine most people have enough food in their pantries to tide them over until the government provides food or restores power.
Modern power infrastructure is incredibly resilient and outages are usually localized to regions and power is restored within hours. I understand the idea of using cash for privacy reasons or keeping few hundred just in case, but keeping with cash just in case a food riot happens is wholly unconvincing.