deadcatbounce

[UK] I carry phone and keys. I pay for everything with my phone. Twerking on street corners as a Gen X for cash isn’t profitable anymore.

If I know I need ID, eg. Costco, I have my old fashioned wallet in my jacket pocket. I keep meaning to set up the Costco ID on my phone. Doesn’t happen.

The number of times I open or reach for my wallet is maybe twice a month. Frigging barber still wants to be paid in cash, and all the 20th century banks and their ATMs are closing … [so now they have 20th century tech and no way to interact efficiently with the public. Haha!].

I’m very increasingly anarchist as I get into my sixth decade - UK 2020s feels like 1970s again so screw the useless thieving politicians - so I should be actively pro-cash but I’m actually more pro-crypto pro-barter (especially pro barter) in the real world. Long ago l learned that if I have physical cash, I piss it up the wall, but I’m careful with credit card cash. No idea why. I never have more than £30 in notes on me; that’s enough money to buy a Costa coffee for you yanks.

Sadly, that means I can’t give cash to the odd homeless. Not too many homeless with contactless readers. Maybe that’ll be rabbit-in-headlights Kier’s big thing: contactless readers for the destitute veterans that the armed services and government abandoned (I came of age around Falkland conflict).

Greetings fellow traveler! [I’m an early model X - late sixties].

Are you taking about the Michael Fish, ‘There isn’t going to be a hurricane.’ blunder? Sevenoakes became Oneoak! 1987 perhaps? I really don’t remember that, would you remind me, please?

I’m talking about the 1970s strikes which cut power to the whole country for sets of three or four days; Ted Heath being reacquainted with the role of the electorate before they all became Tony Blair-esque dopey smiling useless clones in 1992 ish (until we found out about Major-Curry (hehe!)). Going shopping with candles on trolleys, thawing food in the freezers.

(try to) Filling up the car with petrol. #fail. That’s the first thing that I thought of that £78 might almost buy.

Or

Three pizzas.

Or

One bed flat energy bill for the month.

Or

Single person’s grocery bill for maybe a fortnight.

Gen X. The generation that couldn’t be arsed to programme the video recorder or cooker digital time-clock, but knew how to.

There were a lot of power cuts in our (UK) youth and we remember saying to ourselves, “Ok, so that’s how it’s gonna be, huh?!”. Still kicking arse and taking names.

We were the grown-up’s TV remote control, with our 1200 bits per second magnetic tape storage for BBC B home computers (from the later ARM boys), before we got 360kB 5" floppy disks.

Tech doesn’t phase us (yet); AI is a better average conversation than a spouse.

I think most of his cabinet colleagues wishes he would be.

My parents were too but they were anything but. 1920s and 1940s.

In the early days, too much Metformin.

That’s an amazing set of references to throw my way. Thank-you. I’ll read through them in a while. My assertion was based on talking to real people: I’m only just not-Russian myself.

I don’t really think you’ve captured communism: Cuba isn’t. China has been moving away from communism for decades. Russia rejected the Communists for the Bolsheviks shortly after the revolution. There’s a huge difference between socialism and communism.

The West is in somewhat of a hard time. There’s a left shift going on since my golden days (as Gen X). Young people (Gen Z) rightly feel hard done by and the social mobility seems to have been damaged. It feels like the sodding seventies again here in Blighty ( I hadn’t even become a teenager when they ended but remember the mood and despair. Candles lighting the supermarket visits. Dead bodies of the unburied and the rats).

If you’ve never lived in a communist state you’re much more likely to favour communism. People who have (lived in communism) don’t.

'Mercans believe that social healthcare is communism - until they get seriously ill whereupon they opt for moving to a ‘communist’ country: UK or Canada or go for the US healthcare provider called gofundme.

Can I remind you that the US has already had a hand in replacing the leadership once and how that turned out.