Due to the misattributed quotes, this one might be a little tricky for me to respond to, so please bear with me.
No one uses (or accepts) personal checks anymore.
Believe it or not, I do. I don't trust the city with my credit card and they don't take Paypal, so once every two months I send them a check for the water and sewerage. If I'm going to be out of town for longer than that, I overpay sufficiently to keep everything working until I get home.
In this case, the lack of speed isn't a problem - I'm not holding up people at the checkout line, for instance. It's a bit of a pain in the ass for the city to process, but they're a bit of pain in my ass with their overpriced and underperforming sewer system, so I'm perfectly fine with sharing a little pain with them.
Another time that I've used checks is paying for NFA tax stamps. The BATF won't actually accept anything other than checks. Ridiculous, right? There's actually a workaround for that depending on who your Class III dealer is, but the takeaway here is that there's not only people who accept and use personal checks, but there are actually a few people (and at least one government agency) that insist upon them.
How many times the card gets rejected but my cash transaction goes through quicker if I sometimes "help the cashier with the math."
I suppose that's another upside and downside of using a card - the card may not always work (cash almost always does), but nobody has to do any counting either. Theoretically the cards will improve. Will the person counting out your change improve?
Go to a yard sale and you'll find lots of items for a quarter. I often find heavily tarnished silver jewelry for 25 cents.
I've been to a number of yard sales, but I've never seen anything for $0.25 that I wanted, certainly not silver. Apparently we don't get those sort of yard sales around here.
Financial institutions want you to pay for everything with plastic or electronically so that they can get a cut on every transaction.
Ever get charged a fee for using straight cash?
I've never been charged a fee for using cash, no. (Although I have been charged a fee for withdrawing cash.) And yes, some businesses offer cash discounts, but the majority seem not to. At that point, it simply becomes a matter of what's more convenient for me. Cash is not convenient over the internet. Electronic payments are. People pay for convenience.
Simple math applies to a lot more than just cash and should not be phased out of learning institutions. Are you serious?
Completely. How many people actually
need to know how to do arithmetic? I know how to do it and I even do it on a regular basis, but I don't
need to know how to do it. My computer does it. My phone does it. My tablet does it. Some watches do it. If I had to be in some sort of high security area where I couldn't have those things (and sometimes I do have to be in such a place), I could go old school and bring a calculator with me, which also does it. We're literally surrounded by electronics that can do arithmetic, so why bother teaching people something that most of them won't need to know how to do? (And yes, I know that during some existential crisis where the power grid is down and the Russians are launching nukes, those electronics may not be available. However, I'd argue that arithmetic would be the least of my worries under a survival scenario.)
Quick sidebar on this: today's American public education system is basically an extension/modification of the same education system that we were using in 1900 - namely, a multiyear program designed to turn children into productive adults. Productive adults at that time were factory workers, and that's what we trained our children to do. I'd argue that children today don't need to know skills that would be useful to a factory worker living in an era without personal electronic devices (arithmetic, rote memorization of facts, the cursive alphabet) and instead would be far better served by being taught skills that are actually useful in today's society, and will likely remain useful for some time to come: proper grammar, critical thinking, touch typing...hell, even how to phrase a Google search term properly.
But yes, I'm serious. Even as one of the few people that does arithmetic on a regular basis, I'm forced to admit that I don't really need to know how to do it. If I didn't know how to do it, it wouldn't affect my job. Not having a working knowledge of the English language and being able to draft an effective business email certainly
would have a negative effect on my job, but I wasn't taught how to do that until I was an adult. If only they'd taught me that as a child...
Dude, you don't who you're talking too! I've lived off the grid before and yearn to do so again. Not a threat and not ironic.
Few of us know who we're talking to. And yes, it is a bit ironic, but I wouldn't get too wound up over some stranger's opinion on the internet. It's just the internet.
Notice my slow post count?
Interesting that you went there. If we were to average post count over time of membership on Tnet, you'd actually be a more prolific poster than I am. Does this mean that I've spent significant periods of time off the grid?
Why do people now have to be connected to the internet and each other 24/7?
Because the manufacturers of portable electronic devices understand that convenience sells, so that's what they peddle. They're actually remarkably clever.
Speaking for myself, having access to the majority of mankind's accumulated knowledge with a few keystrokes is undeniably attractive. Communicating with people all around the country is also interesting for the sake of perspective. Reading about what somebody had for lunch is less interesting, but that's the internet...it's not just about the cat pictures.
I kid you not! His hands were visibly shaking when he gave me my $.18 change. I know where the employees park so when I saw him standing in the door watching me, I started taking pics of all the plates. Bet he was dampening his linens for a week or two.
