I'm in Sweden. I want to go back to the old ways. I hate how much the US controls our daily life. I hate loss of privacy and the presumption that everyone has a Google or Apple account, and are subject to their whims with little real alternative.
So I stopped using BankID over two years ago, and do most of my daily life in cash.
BankID is made by our banks but okay, I get the phone part.
How do you function day to day without BankID?
It is so integrated now """for convenience""" but yea it really is crazy. Especially how it is tied to having a bank account but the login is for everything. Payments, insurance etc...
Also how it needs Google play so Huawei phones got banned.
I function by being stubborn, and having a wife who can help with a few things.
If BankID worked on a free OS then that would be nice for a few things (like paying taxes, which I still do on paper), but other things are both BankID and Apple/Google smartsphone.
For example, I've made it very clear to my kids' school that I do not and will not get a smartphone, so I cannot use their app (based on Google Classroom). It took months, but now they send me the weekly newsletter by email, and I can call to say if the kids are sick. While my wife can handle the scheduling changes for fritids.
I also have the advantage of living in the center of town, a block from the centralized government services office. The queue is very short most of the time. I also live above my bank, though I'm thinking of switching to Handelsbanken, which is about two blocks, since I've seen how Swedbank is deskilling their local branches.
For the bank I still use a bank dosa. For bus travel I use kontoladdning, though the local transit system wants to replace that with a dependency on (US-based) bank cards - something I think is bad for the unbanked (including youths), visitors from certain countries, and bad for Swedish security as it lets the US restrict someone's ability to use mass transit. For health care I call the local medical center.
I work for myself, through my own aktiebolag, and my accountant handles most of the bookkeeping side of things. My customers are all outside of Sweden, so they don't care about BankID.
A few years ago it was hard to explain to people why I didn't use US-based systems. Over the last couple of years it's become a lot easier, for obvious reasons.
There are still enough old people and others that at least essential services don't require BankID. My wife worked with Ukrainian refugees who had a work permit but couldn't get a bank account. The hotel paid their salaries in cash. That's several levels harder than I have to deal with.
You'll be surprised at how many places still take cash, or will do a faktura, or accept simple bank transfer like we all did 20 years ago.
Nope, only 11% in Sweden prefer cahsless/using cashless since covid, your country isn’t even in the top cashless countries, Thailand Malaysia Spain UAE and even here in Canada are more cashless than Sweden, and that’s not a brag, it’s the opposite.
I have 25 vacation days per year and so does everyone else in Sweden. And we all use them for real it is not like your PTOs. During summer, we make it work but it is a clear standby mode. The upside is we have to staff up too, with regulars and interns.
This is not a tech problem.
This is a you problem.
*Yes salary is way way way way lower. BUT where in the USA could I take a 10min bus (normal people take the bus here not bums) or walk 30-40min to work feeling totally safe even at night? Nevermind I spent 0 on my education in terms of tuition. And live in a city centre, walking to a grocery store with a 60k studio condo? With high speed 5g and fibre. And I hear in the US you have to worry about water or power cuts? Not here lmao.
I mean that simply you make society what you make it.
No, dollar store is a rank above the rankest shit from Temu.
There’s name brand (Apple, Anker, etc → made in China but made well), then there’s off-brand (cheaper than above but still made decently), then store-brand (Harbor Freight and friends, too; cheaper but still functional, not quite as nice), then dollar-store brand (barely functional but usually still “safe”), then Temu-shit (often not fit for purpose and fake certifications, actually dangerous).
More niche hardware has been impossible for me to find in the EU marketplaces I got to with searches, with only availability from US ebay, and then Chinese marketplaces. Or if it does exist here it's the same used part but it costs 500€ instead of 40
Glazing? I stated an historical fact. What doesn't math for me is why we care so much what kind of economy other people decide to have. Eastern Europe isn't soviet anymore obviously. They can make their own choices.
I find younger zoomers say this a lot and even to me in my 30s "oh you had it so easy!" because they think the knowledge today, we would have had back then. This is false.
Loser today, you would have been a loser back then too.
btw guys, stop drinking beer. Makes you so so fat and give you tits. The more you know.
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