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

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.

Specifically, being "cashless" was banned by municipal statute (and rightly so!).

The prices on everything from the parking meters outside to the vending machine in the breakroom are higher for card purchases than they are for cash.

The heck do you need cash for

― Canon in Deez (silby), Tuesday, January 19, 2021 8:39 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

weed still illegal in new york for some reason

My friends who own small businesses pay credit card processing fees (1.3-3.5%) that eat into their margins and are always appreciative to get cash.

i know you made the point about sex workers taking venmo but my weed guys do not

nyc itself has been a haven for cash-only businesses to a degree that other places potentially do not experience xp

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

― shivers me timber (sic), Wednesday, January 20, 2021 5:05 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

damn that'll teach me to read the thread

(it won't)

it's been legal in California for years and the banking regulations (based on federal law) are a major headache and there are even webinars

Also some do to so it’s easier to cheat on taxes.

yes, the donut shop model. Also, some workers are best paid in cash due to immigration issues / complications involving government benefits etc. If the business receives cash from customers, it is easier to pay the workers in cash.

We use PayPal, but that's because of DC weirdness.

The law prohibits selling w33d. It does, however, permit giving it. So you buy something else, like a piece of art or a night in an airbnb, or (in our case) baked goods. The w33d is included as a thank-you gift. It is very convenient.

heh I had a friend who ran a bar in Tennessee that way after hours -- a $3 coke with a free shot of bourbon

two recurring Internet browser gripes:

* used to be every time i wanted to download a file, i got a "save as" dialog box, where i got to choose the path as well as the filename. these days shit just goes wherever it fucking wants, with whatever garbage filename it started with.

or, if i do get the choice of where it goes --- this one is probably Windows-specific --- the system is constantly trying to outsmart me by going to different directories for each thing i download. i think this is windows going "aha, the last file you downloaded with a PNG extension was to THIS directory, six months ago..." aaaaaarrrrrghhhh

* no consistency anymore about whether the 'back' button will actually take me to the previous thing i had on my screen, or like eight steps back, because, surprise! the thing i was looking at was, invisibly, in some kind of nested sub-window and i was supposed to hunt for and click a tiny "X" or "Close" button somewhere. fuck you!!!

The "save as" thing can usually be configured in the browser settings, at least that's the case in Firefox and Chrome. You can define a different behavior for each type of file (like, if it's a .avi always ask the user but if it's a PDF open it within the browser or open a specific application etc.)

lol my company has some programs that only work in Internet Explorer. it doesn't work on Microsoft Edge.

do you know how more involved it is to launch IE on Windows 10? it requires three steps.

(in this case, the backward step = my dumb company making something IE only in 2021)

I'm finding this new tabbing system on Chrome for Android especially confusing and infuriating. Now we've got tabs within tabs, but I can't seem to open a link in a new tab, just an incognito tab??

i hate the way the tabs work now. i know how to use them but...it's annoying.

thanks, dinsdale, i'll take a look!

along the same lines: i disabled the chrome android tab groups or tab clusters or whatever they're called, because they were driving me insane. i can't remember how. but it can be done!

no consistency anymore about whether the 'back' button will actually take me to the previous thing i had on my screen

if people embed a photo on ILX that's from a facebook-owned site, it won't embed for me. if I right-click to view the photo, and then discover that it was on a facebook site, I am unable to return to the thread bcz facebook trick the browser into thinking you were never on the world wide web, why would you want to go off our platform, you don't need a back button, there was never a back button here. looking at this photo is the only think you have ever wanted to do on the internet.

back button? it doesn’t look like anything to me

I've complained about that before. the trick is to open in new tab. then just close the tab.

I read ILX in firefox

speaking of tabs, it used to be easier to get to the url of images via google ... it does reduce my ability and desire to image bomb threads so, maybe this is a good thing?