Non-political things that make you say...WTF?!?! (Welcome To Florida!) **NOT CV RELATED** NO TALKY!

I mean it already is kinda. 99.9% of all my purchases is digital.

 

Cash is rarely used by anyone now.

Almost everything is check, credit card, or EFT.

I keep about $20 cash in my wallet and I can go weeks before I spend it all.

Just checked.

I still have $18 and it's been a couple of weeks.

I blew $2 cash on that capuccino at QuikTrip

 

I mean its not like the fed can't make money disappear out of your bank accounts anyway... or just cease it without warrant or return at the airport.

 

It doesn't help that we don't even get paid by check anymore. It's all direct deposit so I never bother with pulling any out. Only time I see cash is when I travel or go on road trips.

 

Yep. I pay for most stuff with applepay via watch, or a card when that's not available.

I pretty much only use cash at something like an outdoor/farmers market or food truck* or similar. Even that may be going away soon enough as a simpler alternative Square etc is coming: https://www.macrumors.com/2022/01/26/iphones-credit-cards-nfc-feature/

* couple local breweries partner with food trucks, I don't otherwise seek them out.

 

Hookers and blow account for only 0.1% of your purchases by value? Rich mofo you are.

 

Even my gas I pay through an app to avoid debit fees plus I get a discount for using the app. So now I pay what the cash price is or less.

 

Gotta pay to play

 

I never use debit. Ever. Always credit card. Always paid off. ApplePay where it'll get me 2%, or a Citi mastercard with 2% cash back where it won't. Restaurants or gas I use Sam's mastercard for 3% & 5% cash back respectively. I can think of only one gas station which has cash/credit differential pricing and I never use them anyway.

Although my bank gave me a combo debit/atm card it stays home locked safely away except when explicitly needed.

 

^This.

Debit cards are far more likely to leave you responsible in the case of fraud.

It varies by institution but many debit cards give you only 2 days to dispute a charge, whereas credit cards give you 60 days.

I use debit card only to get cash at ATM, credit card for everything else.

Pay it off every month and all your purchases are in one place in a nice, neat ledger.

Plus get the points and redeem them for cash back into your account.

 

Yep. And even when you catch the fraud it can be a real headache.

Someone I work with had his debit card number stolen and his bank account emptied. Just when some ACH based auto-pays occurred. Big mess of NSF fees. While he ended up not actually losing any money, it took hours on the phone getting it all straightened out.

Contrast to my experience when I had a credit card number stolen - card issuer calls me to ask if I made xyz charges, I told them I didn't, and I had a new card in a couple days. Did need to change a couple of autopays to the new card number but that was a couple minutes on the service providers websites.

 

Lots of people see the Visa or Mastercard logo on their debit card and think it's the same as a regular credit card.

Nope, nope, nope.

 

My mom had her debit card 'copied' when she was traveling in 2020 and noticed the extra charges after she got her monthly statement (credit union) and it was all resolved and returned after months of paperwork and follow up. She did have to file a wire fraud claim with the local police because of the way the money was withdrawn, they said "your credit card number was probably sold off to someone and they created a fake card to use it, likely won't get caught or persecuted".

 

I rarely use cash. When a homeless person hits me up for cash and I tell them I don't have any, I'm not lying.

 

Clarification via https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/unauthorized-credit-debit-card-charges-29654.html

Of course some banks may provide more generous terms than the above.

 

Great resources there!

 

Going back to WTFs...

New scientific paper claims octopuses are actually aliens from outer space

Octopuses are from space. I know, that sounds like the opening line of a cheesy science fiction movie from the black and white days of Hollywood. But it’s actually the main part of the argument behind a research paper published in an actual peer-reviewed journal. The paper was published in the journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology. Titled Cause of the Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic?, the paper digs deep into the origin of life on Earth.

As a result, it posits that life began thanks to a rain of retroviruses, which literally fell from space. Those retroviruses then added new DNA sequences to terrestrial genomes, which the paper says further drove mutagenic change.

Where things start to get really interesting, though, is when the paper starts to discuss the arrival of cephalopods. The paper itself claims that certain cephalopods like octopuses, squid, and others arrived on the planet by falling from space, frozen in a kind of stasis.

“Thus the possibility that cryopreserved squid and/or octopus eggs, arrived in icy bolides several hundred million years ago should not be discounted,” the paper reads. The authors of the paper say that the octopus and other creatures benefit from biological features that appear to have been derived from “some type of pre-existence.”

The idea that life originated beyond Earth isn’t exactly a new one. As Stephen Fleischfresser points out in a post about the paper from 2018, the theory of panspermia has been around since Ancient Greece. However, this is perhaps one of the first times that we’ve seen scientists claiming that octopuses are from space.

It is, honestly, an exciting idea, that octopuses are from space. After all, there’s still a lot that we don’t know about the origin of life. Or even whether life exists beyond our own planet. Sure, we’re slowly discovering more about the universe. But this paper fails to put itself above any of the other theories we have out there.

Keith Baverstock, a medical researcher with the University of Eastern Finland, reviewed the paper. In his review, Baverstock stated that there is indeed a lot of evidence that makes the thesis plausible. However, he said that this isn’t how science advances. Because so much of the evidence is not definitive, this thesis only adds to the mystery surrounding the origin of life. In fact, nothing in the paper’s summary really helps us better understand the history of life on our planet. It only adds more conjectures to the already overflowing pot of theories that science has birthed over the years. (via ScienceAlert)

Still, there’s something interesting about the possibility that octopuses are from space. Sure, it might sound crazy, but the authors of this paper have presented a lot of interesting evidence for other scientists to mull over. Of course, it’s going to take a lot to actually prove it, too. And, singling out one specific group of animals could be making the focus far too narrow to actually prove anything. For now, all we can do is look back at the paper and watch to see what other evidence these scientists might bring forward in the future.

 

NOLO has long been a nice resource for stuff.

I do find the credit card protections a whole lot simpler:

 

Someone stole my wife's debit card but I didn't report it because they were spending less than she was.