US Politics Thread 2016-2020

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by AVGWarhawk

They need to print more because there are an abundance of skin bars requiring single dollar bills from the partrons to participate in the show.

The easier way to bring more notes of lesser value on the streets, is to forbid cash payment and ban notes and coins, and go all-digital and cash-free. Its also easier for the state and for the banks and credit companies to plunder those private savings of people that so far get hidden by their owners by not storing them on banking accounts, but in private safes. If all is digital in the money world, and people have no more altenratives and options to evade the plunderers,

- banks can dictate any fees and costs they want,

- credit card companies can dictate any fees and costs they want,

- central banks can go to negative interests and steal and plunder private values as they want,

- finance ministries can blackmail and cash even easier any protection money that they want,

- a person's consumer and behavior profile can be even easier completed and examined to detail that most people are not even now aware of.

Its like demanding the victim of a rape to thank its rapist afterwards for the pleasurable experience. Its a crime of the highest and most inhumane category. The negative consequences for states, societies, whole people and economic systems, cannot be overestmated, and they are here to last for long time to come. Few people are really aware of all this, and just think in terms of their most imminent comfortability, and not thinking of the consequences. Idiots.

I will never understand why peope use credit cards. I go to the bakery, and buy a bread. The woman gives me the bread, but when I want to hand her the money, a foreigner squeezes himself in and takes my money from my hand, and hands it over to her. She counts the chnage, and gives it not to me, but to him, and then he gives it to me. And for this "service" of his he demands me - or her, or us both - to pay him a fee...? He should be spanked and then brought to court, like credit card companies should be burned down from roof to basement. Parasites, nothing else they are. And great illusionists.

People use credit cards because they find it more convenient than cash. They pay a small charge for the convenience. This is how the market works. You should know this, Skybird.

[August]

Originally Posted by Skybird

I will never understand why peope use credit cards. I go to the bakery, and buy a bread. The woman gives me the bread, but when I want to hand her the money, a foreigner squeezes himself in and takes my money from my hand, and hands it over to her. She counts the chnage, and gives it not to me, but to him, and then he gives it to me. And for this "service" of his he demands me - or her, or us both - to pay him a fee...? He should be spanked and then brought to court, like credit card companies should be burned down from roof to basement. Parasites, nothing else they are. And great illusionists.

You come up with some really wild ideas sometimes Skybird.

Why don't you understand that a credit card sells convenience? The convenience of not having to walk around with large amounts of cash. I'll never stand in front of that bakery woman and rummage though my pockets trying to dig up enough change to pay for the bread because I forgot to go to the bank earlier or had that second piece of strudel, nor will she have to worry (at least with me and other CC users) about keeping enough cash on hand to make change for the large denomination bill you and everyone else used to buy your bread. (FWIW a considerate person would have exact change for the poor bakery woman)

I will also never have to worry about stopping a thief from spending the large wad of cash that he found in the wallet that he just stole from me. A simple phone call deactivates the card and gets a replacement in the express mail on it's way to me wherever I may be, home or overseas. Same thing applies to the bakery woman's cc receipts.

Contrary to your claims I don't pay for this convenience at all. There is no annual fee and I pay the bill off every month so no interest fees. In fact using the card pays me. I got about $300 worth of free merchandise from Cabelas the other day because I use their card.

So while I don't support eliminating cash i'm certainly not going to advocate beating up credit card company owners and torching their businesses even if I didn't want to use their service. Far from being the useless parasites you claim they are, CC companies provide a popular and profitable service to millions of people who are satisfied enough to continue to use them. Who are you to say the rest of the world should be forced to conduct their financial business like you do?

[Platapus]

The best part about using a credit card is that I am using their money. Something goes wrong with transaction, I hope the credit card company can solve THEIR problem.

Three times in my life I have had my credit card number stolen and used fraudulently. In all three times, the credit card company worked very hard to solve their problem.. because it was their problem. Not mine. Costs me a little time and some minor postage. Since I also pay off my balance every month and there are no annual fees, it literally costs me nothing.

What I can't understand are people who get credit cards with annual fees. If there is an annual fee, there better be a very very low interest rate.

But then, I worked for almost 40 years to get and maintain good credit.

Credit is a tool that can be used wisely or unwisely. In itself, there is nothing good nor bad about credit. It is all in how you use it.

[Skybird]

Instead of replying to your last posts, guys, just imagine I repeat the one I just made above, for I mean and stick to every single word of it. In parts, the evils described there are already reality, and if you cannot see that, nothing and nobody can help you. You can lead the horse to water but you cant make it drink.

Its unjust and wrong however, that people like me get pulled down and into the abyss alongside with you. When I realised this some time ago, that was the day when I completely cancelled and deleted any remaining sense of solidarity I still may have had back then. When you guys burn from all this, you got what you asked for, and that is fair. When the few people like me burn, we must so only because you wanted it. And that is a crime against us few.

Originally Posted by Skybird

Instead of replying to your last posts, guys, just imagine I repeat the one I just made above, for I mean and stick to every single word of it. In parts, the evils described there are already reality, and if you cannot see that, nothing and nobody can help you. You can lead the horse to water but you cant make it drink.

Its unjust and wrong however, that people like me get pulled down and into the abyss alongside with you. When I realised this some time ago, that was the day when I completely cancelled and deleted any remaining sense of solidarity I still may have had back then. When you guys burn from all this, you got what you asked for, and that is fair. When the few people like me burn, we must so only because you wanted it. And that is a crime against us few.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Platapus

Credit is a tool that can be used wisely or unwisely. In itself, there is nothing good nor bad about credit. It is all in how you use it.

That is only true if you differ between credit that is basing on consuming that did not take place, so it is the savings by somebody else that you lease, and credit that just creates the money you lease from empoty air, and thus increases (=inflates) the money tzhere is, but must not create material securities for the sum of money created.

The first is like you said. The altter is the inevitable destruction of every economic market order and money system yiou can imagine. But in a world where the vast majoirty of people think money is harvbested from epoty vacuum in space and then rains down from the sky, most people just cannot understand this.

I recommend, as one possible book amongst several others, by Alfred Hayek: The Pure Theory of Capital, which is available as a free, legal and complete pdf download from this link. No, I have not read the whole book.

But most of it.

LINK download

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by AndyJWest

How... clever. I must fall silent in the face of such overwhelming display of intellectual superiority. I admit: yes, I have demons inside me, and they most be exorcised.

Heil Lemming! May the collective always be with you.

Not only have you not read the whole book, you appear not to know who the author is: Try Friedrich Hayek...

[Buddahaid]

I'm sorry Skybird, but I just don't see how making convenience purchases with CC's is going to cause my downfall. I don't carry any debt save for small purchases from time to time, and only for the billing cycle.

Anyway, I forgot what this had to do with US politics.

[Reece]

I prefer cash, my wife prefers credit cards. One thing for sure you can get by without a credit card but you can't get by without cash. Most places( stores) over here in Australia won't accept a credit card for goods less than $10, some even higher, so if I want some lunch I'd best have some cash!!!

[Kaptlt.Endrass]

Originally Posted by Reece

I prefer cash, my wife prefers credit cards. One thing for sure you can get by without a credit card but you can't get by without cash. Most places( stores) over here in Australia won't accept a credit card for goods less than $10, some even higher, so if I want some lunch I'd best have some cash!!!

I much prefer cash. For me, I feel it's more secure, and it means I can avoid those chip readers the US has everywhere now.

That said, credit/debit cards have their advantages.

[Dowly]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Heil Lemming! May the collective always be with you.

Ah, the good old "Wake up sheeple!" line.

What's next? Those who disagree with your view are misinformation agents paid by the banks?

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Buddahaid

I'm sorry Skybird, but I just don't see how making convenience purchases with CC's is going to cause my downfall. I don't carry any debt save for small purchases from time to time, and only for the billing cycle.

.

It increases pulic acceptance for having cash money banned, which is to be resisted to, for the reasons I just gave above. Its a real sick economy world if people have to pay a bank for alowing them to work with and earn profits with it, instead of getting interests that represents their share of the profits. The term "negative interests", is misleading, such a thing does not exist, it is like a "soft hardness", or a "cold warmth", or driving a one-way-street in the wrong direction. Would you pay me money if you lend your car to me?

Its a massive redistribution here in Europe, from German savings of the ordinary people to the ECB that plunders them to pay its state financing for the South. Ordinary people loose several billions per year this way currently. Not to mention the losses of insurrance companies, pensions fonds - all of which means that in the future these institutions will not be able to serve their obligations, since they cannot make sufficient profits. The losses now are real - but the real bills will be presented in the future. Social dynamite.

BTW, cashless payment takes longer time at least over here, than cash payment. You have to stand longer in line that way. A good cashier beats the card terminal easily and every time. I did such a job for some years, I know it, and I still see it every day I walk into a show and buy stuff. Comfort?

Personally, I hold no part of my private little treasury on a bank account anymore, and I never pay per credit card, nor do I own one anymore. Homeland Security would feel alarmed about me if I ever would enter the US. "No credit cards" or "no cellphones" are internal alarm markers, it is suspicious to not hold creditcards or cellphones.

Everybody is a terrorist these days - as long as his innocence is not proven. Using the war on terror to enforce stricter and stricter surveillance of the people and the public sphere is working as well as it works as a strawman alibi for propagating the banning of cash money. The excuses are bogus claims, but repeat them often enough and yell loud enough, and the mass will believe them.

So when you use your credit card, you help to raise acceptance for bannign cahs money, whether you want that or not. If you belong to those innocent peopel who bepeive in the good and wellmeaning of states, governments and central banks, than of course you will see no harm in this. I recommend to checkl history a little bit, in this case. There is no reason to trust states and governments and central banks. None at all.

And in the end I find it hilarious if people rate such relatively small and unimportant "comforts" like they are being claimed here, as more important than their freedom, basic rights and their privacy. I cannot take that priority serious.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Dowly

Ah, the good old "Wake up sheeple!" line.

What's next? Those who disagree with your view are misinformation agents paid by the banks?

That was my reply to somebody's post whose "quality" deserved this and no other kind of return.