everywhere is absolutely dead

[CunningPlan]

1 hour ago, RentingForever said:

I am in fact moving to the South Island next month for precisely these reasons!

As for Cowes, it's always like that. Only really livens up when the yachting crowd are in town.

Interesting - we were researching for our move next year. 

Which part of the Island did you settle on?

 

[CunningPlan]

40 minutes ago, onlooker said:

We looked a few years back at moving to the IoW. My impression was that equivalent property was about £50,000 cheaper than the mainland, which would be enough to cover the extra cost of travelling backwards and forwards, and the extra cost of buying imported stuff there.

It depends which part of the mainland you are moving from.

I am looking at rents being about 60% what I am currently paying, if not lower.

For example ...

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/property-53974611.html

 

[NuBrit]

On 17/04/2018 at 6:51 PM, A third of everything said:

Went for dinner with friends last night, the others are homeowners and all paid on credit cards as they're apparently skint, I was the only one paid cash.

When the card machine broke at McDonald's a couple of weekends back I was the first out of 8 cars that could actually pay cash.

I had the lady wife out at one of these upmarket (expensive) cocktail bars as she was looking to go. We went during happy hour when it was quiet and got two rounds using the 2 for a tenner deal. After happy hour ended, we stayed for a bit longer but switched to our cheaper usual drinks. By the time we left at about 9pm, the place was heaving with most people ordering cocktails at the full price of about £10, usually in rounds of 8-10 people, mostly by paying with card.

[NuBrit]

On 18/04/2018 at 5:58 PM, LetsBuild said:

I am quite old fashioned and refuse to use contactless. I drill 2mm holes in my contactless cards to disable the countactless but leave the magnetic strip/chip and pin intact and I always pay in cash if possible. Anyway I went to this swanky wine bar a few weeks ago and had a glass of wine with the other half. When I came to pay I went to get cash from my wallet and the woman behind the counter informed me that they didn’t take cash (something that wasn’t pointed out earlier). Well, I was about it go into full blown awkward git mode when my other half saw what was coming and paid on her phone.

 

I am not 100% sure on this but my understanding is that they MUST accept cash to settle a debt? This would include restaurants as you cannot return eaten food/drink? Maybe one of you knows better, would my awkward hit mode have been backed up by law? I hope it would as the place was a bit hipsterish and nothing would have given me more pleasure than to ruin their contactless world.

Contactless payment is just a means by the banks and card companies to encourage you to spend more. 

When RBS first trialled the technology in their canteen, they noticed straight away that with cash, they would just order a coffee, but with contactless, they would add on extras like buns and muffins. Since you are not handing over physical cash, psychologically you don't feel like you are spending your own money when just swiping a card.

It's quite insidious really. When you combine what RBS found and combine it with people under the influence of alcohol, I think you have a terrific money making racket.

[winkie]

26 minutes ago, NuBrit said:

Contactless payment is just a means by the banks and card companies to encourage you to spend more. 

When RBS first trialled the technology in their canteen, they noticed straight away that with cash, they would just order a coffee, but with contactless, they would add on extras like buns and muffins. Since you are not handing over physical cash, psychologically you don't feel like you are spending your own money when just swiping a card.

It's quite insidious really. When you combine what RBS found and combine it with people under the influence of alcohol, I think you have a terrific money making racket.

.....seems very logical.....there are obviously reasons why some things are encouraged and others are not.....that is just one of the reasons why cash is not encouraged and plastic is.....without plastic everywhere would be deader......anyway there is not enough cash to go around.

Edited April 20, 2018 by winkie

[Riedquat]

32 minutes ago, winkie said:

.....seems very logical.....there are obviously reasons why some things are encouraged and others are not.....that is just one of the reasons why cash is not encouraged and plastic is.....without plastic everywhere would be deader......anyway there is not enough cash to go around.

There's more to it than just that though. Chip and pin has been around for long enough now but hasn't had (quite) the same effect. It killed off a lot of cheques but not small cash transactions. There's often a minimum spend on chip and pin, true, but I can't imagine that contactless is cheaper to operate for the banks to justify no charge on that but charge on chip and pin.

[Gigantic Purple Slug]

The reason banks and businesses don't like cash is because it costs more money to make transactions in cash. Here are some ways cash costs more :

i) Lifespan is finite, so government has to make it, which costs money.

ii) Costs longer time to process a transaction (giving change etc), leading to less throughput of customers at busy times, like at sandwich bars.

iii) Costs time and effort to maintain change in tills.

iv) Costs time for businesses to bag up cash and reconcile tills. Costs time for banks to count it when receiving it.

v) Delays in service caused by cash lower throughput as in ii). Another good example of this is in sandwich bars. Generally money is probably one of the most filthy and germ ridden things we handle. This means now in food service often gloves have to be taken off during a cash transaction and put back on again afterwards, slowing throughput down further.

vi) Handling large amounts of cash presents security issues so you need to invest in infrastructure like security pickups, vans safes etc.

I prefer all the above reasons to a conspiracy theory that banks and businesses are trying to get us to spend more money.

[Riedquat]

So let's assume that purely for those business reasons cash were to disappear. Then the same costs have been removed from every business so they're all back to square one relative to each other. In other words no real gain for business from changing technology, other than in the short term for the early-ish adopters (the earliest bear the costs of getting it working and people using it, and possibly backing a white elephant and the late get overtaken).

Edited April 20, 2018 by Riedquat

[Gigantic Purple Slug]

6 minutes ago, Riedquat said:

So let's assume that purely for those business reasons cash were to disappear. Then the same costs have been removed from every business so they're all back to square one relative to each other. In other words no real gain for business from changing technology, other than in the short term for the early-ish adopters (the earliest bear the costs of getting it working and people using it, and possibly backing a white elephant and the late get overtaken).

You could argue that about any technological improvement.

The benefits should be reduced cost to the customer and increased profits to the bank. Maybe some environmental impact benefits as well.

Whether it works out like that though is another issue.

I don't think cash will disappear anytime soon. But obviously the number of transactions that use it are going down and that trend is going to continue for some time to come. Whether it results in the ultimate abolition of cash or not, who knows. I guess the issue will be whether cards functionally replace cash while being more convienet for both the customer and the supplier for legitimate transactions.

[Mancunian284]

On 18/04/2018 at 2:26 PM, chronyx said:

I haven't had an omelette for ages actually. That's tonight's dinner sorted. Cheers!

I’ll third that.  Wide variety of possible fillings too.

Slow cookers are ace as well, we use ours about 3 times a week.  Quite old now but I think it was about £40, money well spent.

[disenfranchised]

On 20/04/2018 at 12:56 PM, Riedquat said:

There's more to it than just that though. Chip and pin has been around for long enough now but hasn't had (quite) the same effect. It killed off a lot of cheques but not small cash transactions. 

Switch cards killed low value retail cheques before chip & pin - I think "peak cheque" was about 1990.

Faster Payments and online banking took out a load of the high value stuff. 

Electronic image based cheque clearing is starting now, and will have taken over from physically carting them about from bank to bank soon.

http://www.unitetheunion.org/news/site-closures-and-600-job-cuts-by-ipsl-branded-tragic-by-unite/

That's another 600 jobs on the white collar automation scrap pile for the banks at the biggest processing company, with more surely to follow across the industry eventually when you consider the reduced branch visits and so on.

[spyguy]

58 minutes ago, disenfranchised said:

Switch cards killed low value retail cheques before chip & pin - I think "peak cheque" was about 1990.

Faster Payments and online banking took out a load of the high value stuff. 

Electronic image based cheque clearing is starting now, and will have taken over from physically carting them about from bank to bank soon.

http://www.unitetheunion.org/news/site-closures-and-600-job-cuts-by-ipsl-branded-tragic-by-unite/

That's another 600 jobs on the white collar automation scrap pile for the banks at the biggest processing company, with more surely to follow across the industry eventually when you consider the reduced branch visits and so on.

Banks finance are at tge pointy end of digitisation - numbers are pure digital info.

[crashmonitor]

11 hours ago, spyguy said:

Banks finance are at tge pointy end of digitisation - numbers are pure digital info.

Manna from heaven for banks, they make little from mortgages but can sit on their backsides and collect billions in acquiring charges off debit and credit card transactions.

Edited April 22, 2018 by crashmonitor

[spyguy]

1 minute ago, crashmonitor said:

Manna from heaven for banks, they make little from mortgages but can sit on their backsides and collect billions in acquiring charges off debit and credit card transactions.

Im not  100% sure on that.

By 2007, banks tended to make their money on everything but the spread off money - fees, scams, fraud, etc.

Ive fallen into the band of people who think that banks are utilities. All tax payer bakced, deposit taking banks should have very strict control on costs.

You are seeing something related at the mo, with the closure of 1000s of bank branches.

Ideally the UK will have 20 odd medium sized banks.

And one would e thrown under the bus every now and then.

 

[Riedquat]

On 20/04/2018 at 2:13 PM, Gigantic Purple Slug said:

You could argue that about any technological improvement.

The benefits should be reduced cost to the customer and increased profits to the bank. Maybe some environmental impact benefits as well.

Whether it works out like that though is another issue.

The same argument is why I find a great deal of advances and "improvements" pointless at best, socially damaging at worst. It was a valid argument for such things improving life a century ago, nowdays it just doesn't seem to work out when most of the real concerns have been sorted. Even cheaper doesn't help much when you can get all you need without too much hassle, or would be able to if the cost of housing didn't soak up such a crazy amount.

[goldbug9999]

16 minutes ago, Riedquat said:

Even cheaper doesn't help much when you can get all you need without too much hassle, or would be able to if the cost of housing didn't soak up such a crazy amount.

This is the problem, we are in a rentier economy where any productivity/efficiency gains are soaked up by higher property prices and rents. Hence its essentially impossible to raise the standard of living no matter how much we pay people or how cheap everything (else) gets.

[disenfranchised]

21 hours ago, spyguy said:

Banks finance are at tge pointy end of digitisation - numbers are pure digital info.

 

One of the growing threats to the banks is Fintec companies making payments cheaper and more convenient than they are able to, whilst using a payments infrastructure they have to build and maintain. 

When you couple that with new financing models for businesses using investment variations on crowdfunding and peer to peer lending, the banks are looking increasingly unwieldy and outdated. No wonder they are so balls deep into mortgaging property on the retail side and creating speculative financial instruments on the investment side.

I have done a fair bit of work on the deep mechanics of how banks reconcile all that digital money. The size of the organisations involved and the age and complexity of some of the accounting systems mean they are often far from the sharp end when it comes to the back end of it all. They can give us as consumers, a nice modern looking app or website, but there's often the IT equivalent of a steam engine in the background.

Edited April 22, 2018 by disenfranchised

[spyguy]

8 minutes ago, disenfranchised said:

 

One of the growing threats to the banks is Fintec companies making payments cheaper and more convenient than they are able to, whilst using a payments infrastructure they have to build and maintain. 

When you couple that with new financing models for businesses using investment variations on crowdfunding and peer to peer lending, the banks are looking increasingly unwieldy and outdated. No wonder they are so balls deep into mortgaging property on the retail side and creating speculative financial instruments on the investment side.

I have done a fair bit of work on the deep mechanics of how banks reconcile all that digital money. The size of the organisations involved and the age and complexity of some of the accounting systems mean they are often far from the sharp end when it comes to the back end of it all. They can give us as consumers, a nice modern looking app or website, but there's often the IT equivalent of a steam engine in the background.

The money in IT to old banks is producing test frameworks to kick the functional tyres, pull out the junk side effects.

Once youve got the test frame work, you can rewrite. But not before.

The futures bright, the futures functional ( haskell)

[Freki]

2 hours ago, disenfranchised said:

 

One of the growing threats to the banks is Fintec companies making payments cheaper and more convenient than they are able to, whilst using a payments infrastructure they have to build and maintain. 

When you couple that with new financing models for businesses using investment variations on crowdfunding and peer to peer lending, the banks are looking increasingly unwieldy and outdated. No wonder they are so balls deep into mortgaging property on the retail side and creating speculative financial instruments on the investment side.

I have done a fair bit of work on the deep mechanics of how banks reconcile all that digital money. The size of the organisations involved and the age and complexity of some of the accounting systems mean they are often far from the sharp end when it comes to the back end of it all. They can give us as consumers, a nice modern looking app or website, but there's often the IT equivalent of a steam engine in the background.

True when you see how well it works with Monzo, it feels like you can have a real edge as a new entrant. The clunkiness of the legacy systems are really impressive. And remember what happened last year with BA? Same shit. 

IT has become to big to move, so now they can only fail. Heck a friend remortgaged with HSBC, someone at the bank made a stupid mistake at one point by filling his previous (rented) address on the paperwork (for the remortgaged property). He went through hell to correct it. IIRC it took 3 months and a threat of legal action.

Monzo, I recorded a video to open an account.

[leonardratso]

35 minutes ago, Freki said:

True when you see how well it works with Monzo, it feels like you can have a real edge as a new entrant. The clunkiness of the legacy systems are really impressive. And remember what happened last year with BA? Same shit. 

IT has become to big to move, so now they can only fail. Heck a friend remortgaged with HSBC, someone at the bank made a stupid mistake at one point by filling his previous (rented) address on the paperwork (for the remortgaged property). He went through hell to correct it. IIRC it took 3 months and a threat of legal action.

Monzo, I recorded a video to open an account.

was that a home made ahem adult type video?

[disenfranchised]

1 hour ago, Freki said:

 IT has become to big to move, so now they can only fail. 

Indeed - usually multiple legacy systems that don't interface well too.

Fascinating and a bit scary to work on when the numbers stop adding up.

[HairyOb1]

12 hours ago, Freki said:

True when you see how well it works with Monzo, it feels like you can have a real edge as a new entrant. The clunkiness of the legacy systems are really impressive. And remember what happened last year with BA? Same shit. 

IT has become to big to move, so now they can only fail. Heck a friend remortgaged with HSBC, someone at the bank made a stupid mistake at one point by filling his previous (rented) address on the paperwork (for the remortgaged property). He went through hell to correct it. IIRC it took 3 months and a threat of legal action.

Monzo, I recorded a video to open an account.

Monzo and Revolut are my fintec's of choice.  Very good work and changing the way banks do their business.  Saving £500 on larger transactions intra EU

[Funn3r]

2 hours ago, HairyOb1 said:

Monzo and Revolut are my fintec's of choice.  Very good work and changing the way banks do their business.  Saving £500 on larger transactions intra EU

I always feel like a shill when I say how great is Revolut, but it is. Just for starters on foreign currency transactions I am saving around 6 quid in every 100. That is money that used to go straight into someone else's pocket. This is my personal real money and I purposely didn't quote it as a 6% saving. 

That's just by not getting robbed on the exchange rate; I am also not paying all the fees that the bank used to charge me  ON TOP OF THEIR POOR EXCHANGE RATE for using my UK debit card in currency other than GBP. 

Revolut and the others have no commercial real estate to pay for - those money change outlets you see at airports will be crushed. 

Throw in the other benefits of extra control and convenience and you've got a winner. As I say I prefer Revolut but I am sure the other ones are fine as well. 

[monkeyman1974]

On ‎22‎/‎04‎/‎2018 at 10:49 AM, goldbug9999 said:

This is the problem, we are in a rentier economy where any productivity/efficiency gains are soaked up by higher property prices and rents. Hence its essentially impossible to raise the standard of living no matter how much we pay people or how cheap everything (else) gets.

Beautifully put.

[MattW]

B&Q was fairly busy this morning.