Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

2FA woes otm. just logged into my bank...

go to bank website on laptop
enter user serial number
enter security question
unlock phone
start bank app
unlock password safe
copy bank password from password safe
paste bank password in bank app
hit generate secret number
type secret number into bank website

(and i fouled up and generated secret number before i was ready and it's only valid for 20 seconds so had to redo it)

Especially with banking, there are times where I’m just like “I’m insured against theft, just let me into my damned account”

without 2fa i'd never have seen my colleague open his google authenticator app to find the codes for the 5 or 6 websites were all 000 000, try to take a screenshot before they changed, panic and fall off his chair.

work web mail login sends you a text with a number in it to verify yourself. it also times out after 20 minutes. i've had 295 such texts from work in the last 6 months.

mine asks me for the same login code 3 times in a row for some reason.

Theres a related idea that I think about often, about tech we thought we wanted but then discarded - when I was a kid two things that signified Our Amazing Future were video phones and food in pill form. Now we have those things, but if you actually met someone today who was like "I only eat soylent & supplements and only communicate via FaceTime" youd be like wow this person is deeply troubled

― “Hakuna Matata,” a nihilist philosophy (One Eye Open), Wednesday, 14 August 2019 17:54 (one year ago) link

regular-ass cash withdrawal transactions at ATMs take, conservatively, 3 times as long as they did 20 years ago.

Any good video game requires twelve buttons

i have felt that atm one, every time

The heck do you need cash for

tips
the laundromat
little daily purchases at places with a $5 or $10 minimum
little daily purchases where you just wanna get things done quickly
bigger purchases at places that charge you less to pay cash, perhaps in order to cheat on their taxes, perhaps to avoid giving a chunk away to the credit card companies
cash-only stores
cash-only salons
cash-only bars
cash-only restaurants
cash-only food trucks, ice cream trucks, (etc.)
garage sales, flea market booths
underground and informal economies generally
vending machines
pinball machines
tolls

you can do a lot with four american dollars

Hmm I just lead a different lifestyle I guess. Not sure when the last time I encountered a cash-only establishment was. Even Dick’s takes cards now.

Cash-only?

By Christ just how far backwards did trump *take* ye?

I think even sex workers are on Venmo.

shrug idk, i mean obv i haven't been out too much in the past ten months but the phrase "ohhh, we're cash-only...." is one i heard many a time in the ten months before that.

yes, like many people i pay for a handful of goods and services in cash, necessitating the use of the ATM every other month or so.

Idk what ATMs y'all are using but mine are actually faster than they used to be ... and as far as what one uses cash for ... damn, making me remember a year ago when there were shows and bars.

xp silby - my sex worker friend gets paid mostly in cash

I eat money

little daily purchases where you just wanna get things done quickly

still no contactless in the US eh

in canada i can put everything on debit or credit card. there's an option to tip on the device in situations where it's appropriate. even tim hortons finally takes plastic now.

Yeah, cash has basically disappeared from my life and the rare things that still required that (some boulangeries for instance) have all turned to contactless with covid. I'm not even sure I use cash once a year !

Cash-only?

By Christ just how far backwards did trump *take* ye?

Yeah, that's crazy. I'm struggling to process the very concept of a cash only anything. We're fast going in the opposite direction in the UK, of places that don't accept cash at al - I've experienced that once, in a posh bar.

there are places in the US that don't take cash too

there's still a few cash-only pubs in Dublin

but they're doing it out of a sort of performative Luddism

I need 50p to put air in my tyres and the logistics of actually getting a 50p-piece seem impossibly baroque.

Just put your lips together and blow.

ditto the £4 for the laundrette. get notes from atm, pay for cheap stuff with it in the self-service tills, pray you don't get £2 coins in the change...

In the workplace, using excel and PowerPoint for all corporate documentation and reporting - even though it’s not actually particularly well suited for word-based documents.

Not helped by corporate templates being badly designed by those who don’t have a good knowledge of the software.

yeah a friend of mine was telling me she got some temp work which involved somehow getting product information out of a giant powerpoint and inputting that into a CMS for their website and i was like.... powerpoint??

With most food apps not allowing for tips to be included in the order I've found cash to be more important in the pandemic than it was before.

xxp I went through the whole process of finding a cashpoint, buying something unrequired to get change, making sure I got 50p in the change etc to use the tyre pump a few weeks back.

Turns out Tesco garage ones are now contactless and I now have a pocket full of corona vectors.

i seem to need cash quite a lot? w33d guy hasn't got contactless yet

oh yeah and a quid for the shopping trolley

and the shop round the corner has a minimum card charge and their machine breaks down every other week

weed from clean shiny shops with 100s of products is cash-based in America too, bcz credit card companies can't process it while it's not legal nationally

W33d and music kit from Gumtree are pretty much my only cash purchases nowadays tbf

My last use case for cash disappeared when I started paying for w33d with M0n3ro.

Here's one though:

Can't play audio directly from a Mac through Microsoft Teams. I have had to do this (and endure this) on a regular basis since lockdowns. Every time it sounds like call-waiting music for the dental surgery because it's being played and received through laptop speakers and mic.
Been chatting to our tech team about it, and there are work arounds, but they're fiddly and not that easy to do.

I prefer cash and pretty much always used it until the pandemic, haven't used any since last March.

i have admittedly been walking around with the same tenner in my wallet for several weeks now

I've had a fiver in my wallet since last March!

Three fivers growing fur in mine since same

The fervour of a furry fiver

I'm a huge Kevin Grisham fan...

Been using cash loads since Covid, as have been getting more things second-hand from people in my village. I've even bartered with packets of flour. There's a bit of a 'things Amazon incorrectly delivered'/'things I accidentally ordered too much of from Ocado/ 'dumb things my online grocery substituted' market going on.

fwiw i still practice cash tipping when i can because when i worked for tips this was very much preferred to credit card tips.

Something that just happened: My whole screen went blank while typing something and my heart leapt into my mouth thinking the computer had crashed. Turned out it was one of those "hot corner" things which I hadn't turned off. What the blazes and why would I want this to happen when I accidentally nudge my mouse into the far corner of my screen??

companies have to pay for credit-card processing so some small local businesses are cash-only to avoid those extra charges

> why would I want this to happen when I accidentally nudge my mouse into the far corner of my screen?

was company policy here, back when we worked in an office, to lock screen when away from computer. there were also tales of people comming back from breaks to find 'comedy' emails sent from their accounts / odd things ordered from amazon. oh, my sides.

Some restaurants, even busy successful ones, chose to be cash only for that reason. Also some do to so it’s easier to cheat on taxes.

There was a movement recently of restaurants going cashless but they got pushback from people saying it’s unfair to mostly low income people who don’t have credit cards. A lot of places in NY went cashless and then switched back.