Japan is living in the future that the 1990s dreamed of.
Japan is living in the future that the 1990s dreamed of.
301 comments
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Why the fuck "cash society" is backside? It means they care about privacy.
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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.
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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 implying the old way is out of date and switching is as much of a "you dont need to think, its just better" (no brainer) as switching your floppy disks and CRTs for USB sticks ano OLEDs.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.
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Why privacy would mean no fax? Fax is mostly more secure than email.
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And money recycling.
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Suuuure, "privacy". Wink wink.
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I'm a criminal! Wank wank, nudge nudge
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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.
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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
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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"?
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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Why should the town charge you?
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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.
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Digitizing some things, like medical records and rare texts, have been extremely useful.
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Digitization of records in general is extremely useful.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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...
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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
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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.
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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.
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I only use cash to buy things from people in my area.
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As soon as I could pay for things with my phone, I did. Now I'm annoyed when I can't.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.)
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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
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People have savings? Sounds like the 90s.
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You think people don't have and use credit and debit cards anymore? Really?
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"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.
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Where you getting the 10k figure, and how many people do you know who would have thay on hand.
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This scenario is of course impossible if you only carry cards or money 🤷
/s
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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
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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.
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$300 is not at all unusual for groceries these days if you have a family.
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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.
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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!
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Germany is the same but without the bullet trains and the robots wiping your ass.
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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.
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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...
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Yeah, when I think of Germany, I think of papers.
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Germany doesn't have bidets? France does.
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Bidet as it may
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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...
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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.
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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.
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I'd argue using cash, paper, floppies is fucking advanced and the right move.
Source - I work on tech
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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
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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.
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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!
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How exactly is a floppy more advanced and the right move? Or fucking paper and photocopiers,/printers.
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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
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What's bad about cash?
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Cash is fucking awesome
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Change / coins are pretty annoying imho
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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.
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It stresses me out giving the cashier a math problem to solve. I know they can a calculator, but still.
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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.
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It's not a million dollar problem, it's a few cents issue. You'll be fine
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Nothing. It must be great. My weed dealer accepts nothing else!
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As a German -Homer disappears in hedge
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We only have a bit of the first panel (technology wise) and all of the bottom one
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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).
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FAX machines is still a thing in 2023!
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America's healthcare system still lives off of fax machines
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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.
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South Korea is more the first case than the second, no?
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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.
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I'm not from the original "developed" nations but imo occupation is a pretty big factor in one's identity.
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Cash Society isn't a bad thing imo.
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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.
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Bro time travelled from 1992 to make this comment
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I did too, but it took 30 some odd years
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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.
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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.
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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.
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What kind of 12 year old smartphone addict shit is this, that thinks fax machines, paper copies, cash and floppies are bad things?
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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.
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With that much hassle, mailing them the document back and forth would be a better way.
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There's nothing wrong with having/paying by cash though.
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Any timeline without cash is not healthy.
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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)?
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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.
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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
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The future has way too much nationalism and misogyny.
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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
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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.
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It is a lot of homeless people but they sleep in internet cafes instead https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_cafe_refugee
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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.
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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.
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Until you find out that those Nuclear launching pads still running with 1970 bug ass floppy disks. Things just work.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Living the casette futurism dream.
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And their website design...
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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)
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If it ain't broken...
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Live in Japan. Plenty of things are quite broken :/
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Floppy disks??
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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)
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All of those apply to Germany as well. Except floppies ...
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I like cash and fax machines. But floppy disks need to be retired. And paper filing is incredibly slow compared to digital databases.
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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.
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I would say this is not bad at all. Nothing wrong with the things that portrayed as bad. Specially using cash
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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.
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japan being the most cyberpunk nation besides communist China and South Korea
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They have those cool blue plastic trays with rubber mats that you put your money in though. And they're everywhere.
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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
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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
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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
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Hello, fax machine? This is Germany!
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Healthcare in the US still relies on a surprising amount of faxing.
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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.
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The Australian government used faxes well into the 2000s, I think the last three faxes I sent though were through my modem
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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.
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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.
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Prescriptions need to be faxed where I'm from.
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Filet mignon from a vending machine is for everyone in Japan.
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That's the"cash society"one.
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"This post is sponsored by the World Economic Forum"
301 comments
Japan has been in the year 2000 for the past 50 years.
Not the first time I see this, still makes me laugh