08.09.12
Chronicles of Annoying Pests
Today, again from the Atlantic where the editors and writers are chosen from the most senseless and fit for the job, someone named Derek Thompson, 1 percent society shoeshiner and “a visiting research fellow at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget at the New America Foundation.”
Let’s count some of the ways it is important: for merchants and for customers. For merchants, point-of-sale technology is awful, outdated, and expensive … Paying for stuff shouldn’t be such a chore…
These are innovations of convenience, mostly, but they arguably build a gateway to bigger things: for data, for advertising, and for, yes, society. The data created with millions of digitized interactions could provide deeper records of what people are buying and how much they’re paying for it — the sort of information that would be important to corporate research departments …
I think the answer is two-fold: (1) Innovations that save time, even just a little bit of time, are real innovations, because in any advanced economy time and attention are currency and creating more of them can make us all richer …
A cashless economy can make us richer: “One 2003 study estimated that moving from a wholly paper-based network to a completely electronic one could save an economy 1 percent …
A cashless society can make us richer. Innovations that save us even trivial increments of time can make us richer. The insipid passed off as critically insightful through the genius of repetition and judging progress by anything alleged to make all thicker in the digital wallet. The very intersection of magical thinking and blowjob journalism.
That’s everyone in society including the forty seven or eight million people on foodstamps, right?
A notable number of them Starbuck’s employees, too, because, like Wal-Mart and so many other US multi-nationals, the company doesn’t pay its floor and wait staff enough to make a single living, in say, Pasadena.
A problem smartphones haven’t seemed able to fix.
But if you’re the guy writing for the Atlantic, waving your nice gadget in the direction of the minimum wage servant, the quick cashless innovation that adds half a minute to your self-gratification time in the corporate coffee house makes us all more wealthy. Well, maybe not today. But soon. I’m just sure of it.
Paying for stuff shouldn’t be such a chore.