(edit: title corrected thanks to @Ghoelian@feddit.nl’s info)

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/1624944

Saw a “no cash” sign at a bakery. Conversation went like this:

me: So, no cash? What’s going on there?

cashier: Yeah, we’re not allowed to accept cash.

me: Isn’t it the other way around? Isn’t there a legal tender law in #Netherlands?

cashier: Yeah, we’re not allowed to refuse cash.

me: So this sign posting says loud and clear “we are breaking the law”, in effect, no? Is that not being enforced?

cashier: That’s right. It’s unenforced in Netherlands.

The same thing is happening in #Belgium. This kind of forces me to revise my understanding of European culture & norms. In both the US & Europe there is a culture of certain laws (rightfully) going unenforced against individual natural people. E.g. small amounts of marijuana possession. But I previously thought when it came to moral/legal people (businesses), they simply complied with the law in Europe to a great extent.

IOW, companies complied with laws in Europe. Contrast that with the US where corporations small and large will blatantly disregard any laws that interfere with profit based on the calculated risk of getting caught and risk of penalties.

I just wonder if Europe is being influenced by cavalier US corps and changing to comply only when penalties are likely. Or is this something I had wrong all along… that EU companies were always loose with compliance?

#WarOnCash

update

The original post was censored without reason by @knollebol4 @nlemmy.nl. It’s now a non-existent node, perhaps rightfully so if it’s going to use an anti-spam tool against ideas.

  • activistPnk@slrpnk.netOPNederlands
    1·
    1 year ago

    There are countries that advocate for the right to pay with cash and the privacy advantages it brings.

    There is an important distinction here between point of sale (PoS) & debts. AFAIK, the Netherlands & Belgium makes no distinction. But Australia & the US does make the distinction because it’s more of an injustice if a debt cannot be settled in cash.

    PoS w/cash ensures privacy & access. It’s also resilient to catastrophes like the power grid going down, bugs and malware bringing down appliances, etc. But if a merchant does not accept cash then it’s not a big¹ deal. The contract doesn’t happen and at least neither party is at a loss.

    W.r.t. debts, a debtor cannot guarantee bank access throughout the whole duration of the contract. Creditors also profit from late fees when their info system goes down or they do something to make payments painful or they alter the firewall config to block some customers. The debtor should not be put in a position of incurring penalties whenever the creditor adversely changes the info system. Cash should always be an option because shit breaks.

    I’ve had a bank that decided out of the pure blue “we are closing both walk-in service and the website permanently… use our closed-source smartphone app which only works on very recent phones if you want to continue accessing your money”. Not joking. Banks are pulling that shit. I have a term for this: “broken”. When my bank is broken, I still need to be able to pay creditors & if they don’t take cash & yet still expect to be paid, on time or penalty levied, it’s an injustice.

    ¹ Assuming we’re not talking about something extremely essential. When there is one energy supplier to choose from and they don’t take cash, that is a big deal. So really there needs to be a further distinction between PoS of something both essential and uniquely sold, and other sales.

      • activistPnk@slrpnk.netOPNederlands
        1·
        1 year ago

        Bank accounts have been the norm for paying most services like energy suppliers for so long that I don’t think you’re going to find a company here that will let you send cash to them.

        That’s a problem because now that banks have started violating people’s human rights, the energy suppliers forced banking policy doubles down on those human rights violations.

        If the grid (or more likely, the internet) goes down then you do have a problem. Customers of ING and Rabobank will attest that it’s quite annoying when the bank goes down for a few hours, usually people find out about that happening when doing groceries.

        The grocery store is not going to let you walk out with groceries if their payment system is down. Hence the importance of cash.

        If your bank stops supporting your phone for whatever reason, they’ll give you notice in advance.

        The way I received a notice was the app refusing to function. I do not call that “in advance”. Nor does advance warning justify it. They can give months of advance warning - I’m still being forced into the private marketplace to needlessly procure new hardware because of designed obsolecense. To not object is to support that abuse.

        Rabobank and ING have special reader devices you can request that will scan a QR code and authenticate payments and logins for those without phones.

        There are also still banks that have over the counter service and web service. This does not obviate the fact that some banks impose a closed-source app that depends on agreeing to Google or Apple’s privacy-abusing ToS. Any and all banks are within their rights to go in that same direction. Pointing to a couple banks and saying “look, these two banks are not yet fucked up” is not decent rationale for forced banking.

        Your bank isn’t a party to your contract with your creditors.

        Bingo. That’s the problem. The finger-pointing is designed to point blame on the victim.

        If you care so much about being able to pay in cash, negotiate a contract that will let you do so.

        I think you missed my comment that mortgage contracts are non-negotiable.

        It’s not your creditors’ problem if you decide to unbank yourself, they’re almost always free to refuse you service if your decisions make you impossible to work with.

        Actually it is their problem. They can point to the contract all they want but they can’t suck blood out of a rock. If they shoot themselves in the foot by drafting a fragile contract with simple points of failure, they have a business problem because they still need to get paid. It’s also the victim’s problem to the extent that the debt is high enough for the lender to put a lien on the home. That’s actually the only problem I care about because a human being is taking a hit for an incompetent system in that case.

          • activistPnk@slrpnk.netOPNederlands
            1·
            1 year ago

            I don’t really understand what human rights banks have violated here.

            Banks are giving different treatment to different customers based on their national origin. They singled out those born in a particular country. Some banks showed the marginalized group the door… gave them a GTFO in one month notice. Other banks said “you can stay, but we’re reporting your activity to Canada (for example)”. If you are born anywhere else, you do not get that “special” treatment. It’s a human rights violation because people are not being treated the same.

            Small amounts of cash, for sure. Everyone should have enough cash ready to buy a week’s worth of groceries in my opinion. Unless you’ve managed to score a pretty great deal on a mortgage, that’s not mortgage payment money.

            Regardless, the mortgage still remains unpaid if the grocer accepts your cash but the lender does not.

            That’s very strange. What bank was this? Both my banking apps always tell me this type of news one or two months in advance.

            If only the app tells you, that’s obviously incompetent design as it relies on you opening the app frequently enough. Not that it matters, because as I’ve said the designed obsolescence driven forced upgrades are injustice whether they are warned or not.

            The fact you bought a phone from a company that refused to maintain its software isn’t your bank’s problem, though. It’s not the supermarket’s fault if the car you bought isn’t allowed into the milieuzone the store is in either.

            It is the bank’s problem because the bank chose the platform. And the bank chose a platform that all vendors neglect to maintain. (of course, that’s how capitalism works; there’s diminishing profits if you maintain the software for the life of the hardware). I countered that by installing the bank app on a virtual machine with recent SDK (which is the only way to get immunity from designed obsolescence). The bank app detected that it was being run inside of an VM and refused to run. So by your analogy, it’s more like the bank has deliberately taken an pro-active action to sabotage your car from reaching it.

            Then you should either save up and purchase a house lump sum or rent somewhere. You’re the one asking for a huge amount of money from someone else, they have a say in how they like to be paid.

            You’re still ignoring human rights. When the bank takes a Canadian to court because the discriminatory treatment lead to inability to pay their debt, the gov itself is bound by the human rights covenant that they signed.

            I don’t know what happened between you and your bank but I fail to see the practical problem here. Do you have an example of someone taking the hit because they had plenty of clean cash but no access to a bank for some reason? Practically speaking, anyone with enough money to get a mortgage can buy a €100 smartphone (or a €50 one at Marktplaats) that they use just for banking and nothing else.

            You’re confusing multiple different problems. The smartphone problems are inherited from a forced banking posture. You impose banking on people but you do not grant them a right to not use a smartphone so in principle all banks can force you to do something unethical (buy a phone every couple years). It’s also a money problem because the population pushed into forced banking is bigger than the home loan debtor population. It includes poor people. The mortgage problem is a problem of having a loan for 10-30 years out where you cannot predict how the banks will treat you, so you’re being forced to make a promise that you cannot guarantee. You cannot guarantee that your bank account is sustainable. You can’t guarantee that the law doesn’t change. And when the law does change the problem is it’s the human being who didn’t have negotiating leverage that takes the hit for the change, not the bank who has control over what they draft.