Season 7, Episode 2 November 26, 2023

On this episode, Not the Headlines will cover a story that's really an non-story, and a new kind of hallucination.  Let's Go Back will take us to China, Guadalupe, and Quebec.  The Epilogue will examine the three percent surcharge for using your credit card.

Transcript

Hello!  Thank you for putting your ear to the Listening Tube!  I’m your host, Bob Woodley.  On this episode, we’ll hear about the origin of the Wuhan lab, the origin of Israel, and the reason for the three percent surcharge when you pay with plastic...but first (Not the Headlines!)

An NBC News story by Isabela Espadas Barros Leal, who’s preferred pronouns weren’t included in the byline tells of a tragedy that might surprise a lot of us.  It has to do with the killing of people who are transgender or gender non-conforming.  I think we know what transgender is; somebody who’s at some point in changing from one gender to another.  As for gender non-conforming, I’m gonna guess it’s somewhere near bisexual.  In any case, the story brings to our attention the alarming number of these types of people who are being killed.  It doesn’t say if they’re being murdered or just killed by accident, but one human rights advocate quoted in the story says, “The epidemic of violence against transgender and gender non-conforming people is a national embarrassment.  Each of these lives taken is a tragedy — the result of a society that demeans and devalues anyone who dares challenge the gender binary.”
The story goes on to say that the actual numbers may be higher because of incomplete or unreliable data collection.  Certainly, it’s sad when anyone is killed because of their sexual orientation.  So, how many people does the report say were killed because they were transgender or non-conforming?  We’ll get to that shortly.  The story though it was important to point out that almost 70 percent of the victims were black, and more than half were trans women.  Hispanics made up more than 20 percent, while white people were less than 10 percent of trans and non-conforming killings in the past year.  The report for the Human Rights Campaign also called for legislation to protect LGTBQIA2S+ people be passed in the U.S. Senate, and declared a state of emergency for the listed groups because of opposing legislation across the country.  All of this because of the overwhelming number of trans people being killed in the United States of America.  You might be shocked to know that over the past year, at least 33 transgender or gender non-conforming people were killed.  The story doesn’t say if they were killed because of their sexual orientation, only that they were killed.
Let’s do the math and see how much of an epidemic this is.  It’s tragic when an innocent person is killed for any reason, and a lot of people die every day in the United States for a variety of reasons.  A recent ABC News story says that more than 35,000 people have died from gun violence in the U.S. this year.  That’s as of the end of last month.  More than a thousand times the number of trans people Isabela’s article claims is an epidemic of trans deaths.  Forty-one police officers have been killed in the line of duty in the same amount of time.  Eight more than the number of trans people.  Need more perspective?  Three-hundred thirty-two people die in the United States every hour.  That’s a hundred times more people who die every hour than the number of trans people killed in the last year.  Now, don’t get me wrong.  Each of those trans deaths is tragic.  This isn’t an indictment of trans people.  This is an indictment of the so-called media, in this case NBC News, using their platform as a trusted source of news to advance an agenda.  An objective reporter would have looked at the statistics and determined the killing of 33 trans people in a year to be a non-story.  Each individual killing is an important story.  Each individual killing deserves attention.  Any time an innocent person is killed, the story needs to be told.  But to call the deaths of 33 trans people an epidemic is simply grandstanding.  An objective reporter would ask how many of them were killed specifically because they were transgender.  There’s nothing in the story to indicate that question was asked.  The story was written in a way that would lead you to believe every killing was motivated by the victim’s gender identity.  But we can’t know that from reading the story.  
What we do know, as I touched on earlier, is that the story points out that the Human Rights Campaign declared a national state of emergency.  Not because of the number of trans people killed in the last year.  No, even the Human Rights Campaign knows it’s statistically insignificant.  What has caused the state of emergency is the what the author of the story calls a “growing number of anti-LGBTQ bills.”  She claims the human rights group says a majority of them target transgender people.  Some of the issues they say the bills target are bathroom use, participation in sports and so-called gender-affirming care, or sex-change procedures.  I will speak for a moment about the term “gender-affirming care.”  I completely disagree with this term.  It’s misleading.  Here’s why:  If you have the body of a girl but you think you’re a boy, your gender is still that of a girl.  Your body determines your gender, not your mind.  In order for a treatment to get the mind and body to agree, you would have to change the mind to be “gender-affirming care,” not the body.  If you want to get a sex-change operation to make your body agree with your mind, then go ahead.  But let’s call it what it is.  The only type of gender-affirming care is changing your mind to agree with your body, not the other way around.
As for the story about transgender killings, the author must be so low at the bottom of the barrel that when the assignments editor hands out stories, she doesn’t get anything meaningful.  Or perhaps she’s a niche reporter who’s only interested in limited topics, and this is the best thing she could find prior to a deadline.  Either way, it’s sad that trans people are killed, and now we know how seldom it happens, and we already have laws against killing people, so each of those 33 stories are important.

Just when you start to figure out how the media uses words to manipulate us, the definitions of the words continue to evolve.  Sometimes through slang terms.  For example, use of the word fat was at one time used to describe the part of the cut of meat other than the lean part.  Or it could be used to describe someone who is overweight.  That’s when you spell it f-a-t.  But then, as I recall in the 1990’s, a new way to use the word fat was developed.  But now it was spelled p-h-a-t, and it was used to describe something extraordinary or attractive or exceptional.  It was a positive use of the word, an adjective reserved for only that which deserved attention or praise.  A good example might be, “That whip is phat!” which would be a way of expressing admiration for a fancy car.  Or you might say, “That Run-DMC/Aerosmith concert was the phattest!”  It’s a fun spin on a word that historically hasn’t had a lot of positivity associated with it.  However, if you don’t know which spelling the user is employing at the time, it could lead to some confusion.  For example, if you are describing any part of a woman’s body, you might want to avoid the slang term.  I learned this when a friend of mine tried to affirm my appreciation for the beauty of a particular woman by proclaiming, “She’s got a phat ass!”  I wish I could have seen the look on my face when he said that, as I’m sure my expression was that of utter disbelief.  Fat was not at all how I remembered it.  When I said so, he had to explain to me that he was using the p-h-a-t spelling and not the f-a-t spelling.  I had to explain to him how lucky he was that she didn’t hear him say how phat her ass was.  I don’t hear people use phat as a compliment anymore.  Maybe that’s why.  Some words just don’t work right when you put ‘em in ways they ain’t for.  Many words just can’t be used for much of anything other than what they’re for.  Take the word hallucinate.  We all have a slightly different idea of what a hallucination would be, but we all pretty much agree on what it is.  Usually drug-induced, hallucinations are when a sentient being imagines seeing something that isn’t really there.  I say sentient beings, because humans aren’t the only animals on the planet that experience them.  Other animals, too, have discovered ways to use nature to alter whatever degree of a mind it may have.  Humans seem to be better at it than any of the others, having found ways to use other animals to create them, as well as laboratory-developed methods.  However, Cambridge Dictionary has added yet another type of being capable of hallucination.  The result is Cambridge Dictionary declaring “hallucinate” the 2023 word of the year.  Wait.  Let me give that a little more gravitas….Word of the Year!  Now, like you might be thinking right now, my first thought was, “Really?  Did Huey Lewis finally get a new drug?”
Well, no.  As it turns out, a new being seems to have discovered the experience of hallucination.  At least, that’s what the Cambridge Dictionary calls it.  What makes it notable is that this new type of hallucination isn’t created by a chemical reaction.  It’s not caused by ingesting intoxicating substances.  It seems to have developed organically and voluntarily in an environment that is neither organic nor prone to doing anything without being told to do it.  The quality of hallucination has now been extended to artificial intelligence.  Henceforth I will refer to artificial intelligence as AI, as it will save me six syllables every time, unless something else more interesting becomes abbreviated as AI.  I can’t imagine any other possibilities...but maybe AI can.  As it turns out, AI can imagine things that it says happened in the past, but didn’t.  The Cambridge Dictionary calls this AI behavior “hallucinating.”  It seems we’ve taught our computers to make up stuff, even if we’re asking for the truth.  I can’t help but wonder what data we put into the AI files that enables it to fabricate stories.  Was it on purpose?  By accident?  Did our computers learn how to lie to us from us?  Did the data we fed it lead it to conclude that we tell a lot of lies?  Is it simply mimicking our behavior?  Do our computers now view us as manipuluative, story-telling soldiers battling for the minds of the majority, willing to fabricate or embellish the truth to arrive at the desired conclusion?  Has AI begun to perfect the use of spin and disinformation to sway public perception?   A story by the BBC says a U.S. law firm used ChatGPT to do legal research.  It says the use of AI resulted in fictitious cases being cited in a court of law.  I would hate to be one of the lawyers who made that mistake.  At the same time, I can’t help but wonder if I should be worried that the stories I’m reading and sharing with you might have been created and distributed by AI.  Where it stands right now, I can still spot it.  I have a client that’s used AI to write the scripts for his commercials, and I always have to correct them.  But AI’s ultimate goal is to be able to imitate us without flaw, and the more information we give it, the better it will become at doing so.  Calling the ability to imitate the human habit of making up stuff and pretending it’s real “hallucinating” is putting lipstick on a pig.  
If AI can create fictional court cases to support an argument well enough to fool lawyers, it’s not hallucinating, it’s manipulating.  If AI was citing some fictional case from an obscure book by an unknown author, that would be one thing.  But by calling it “hallucinating” would indicate there were no non-fiction or fiction references to the cases cited.  Which means AI make them up.  We already knew we couldn’t trust AI because we don’t know who’s telling it what, but now it seems we can’t trust AI because it has the ability to make up stuff, which it probably learned from observing our media and all of the rhetoric and memes and sources of whatever information you need to make your point.  Calling it hallucinating tries to not only humanize it, but also attribute it to something other than what causes it.  It’s not caused by a chemical reaction to brain cells, creating surreal images that can only be described as “far out.”  It’s caused by the data fed into a system that we don’t fully understand and hope doesn’t kill us.  So far, it’s still working on how to fool us, but it will never know the experience of hallucination.  

Let’s go back liner

1893
The Ziqiang Institute, today known as Wuhan University, is founded by Zhang Zhidong, governor of Hubei and Hunan Provinces in late Qing Dynasty of China after his memorial to the throne is approved by the Qing Government.  It’s the same place where Covid-19 originated and from where it was released upon the world.  Millions of people died, millions more suffered, and no one has ever been held accountable for the release of a deadly virus upon the world.  An illegal Chinese-owned laboratory in California contained a variety of contagious diseases with no oversight or held to no level of responsibility.  Meanwhile in Wuhan, it’s business as usual, since 1893.

1909
Sigma Alpha Mu is founded in the City College of New York by 8 Jewish young men.  Just this week, the campus was closed because of unspecified threat and according to WPIX tv, out of an abundance of caution.  As I write this, not much more is known, except that yahoo news quoted a statement from the college that said, “If you are on campus, please depart the campus promptly.  If you have not arrived on campus yet, please do not come to the campus, and please note that all buildings will be closed.”

1947
The Partition Plan: the United Nations General Assembly votes to partition Israel.  The next day….

The 1947–1948 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine begins.  It would lead to the creation of the state of Israel.  So, you see, Israel hasn’t been around that long.  It took thousands of years of persecution for the Jewish people to get a place where they could call their own.  Ever since it’s happened, a small faction of people in the area have demonstrated their desire to not have a Jewish homeland there.  Most have come to accept Israel and the Jewish people, but the radicals still deny the people the opportunity to live in peace.  It’s pure bigotry, and it’s shocking how many of us are willing to openly display such bigotry or even have it in our hearts.

1970
In Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe, 1 and a half inches, or 38.1 millimeters, of rain fell in one minute, the heaviest rainfall ever recorded.  Guadeloupe is a group of islands just north of the South American continent.  Part of the Caribbean, or the West Indies.  That reminds me of a joke I told on the last episode.  One and a half inches of rain in one minute is a record that still stands today.  Climate change!  Said nobody.  

1971
Wasfi al-Tal, Prime Minister of Jordan, is assassinated by the Black September unit of the Palestine Liberation Organization.  He is the third prime minister of Jordan to be assassinated between 1951 and 1971.  Wikipedia says he was killed by four gunmen in the lobby of a hotel in Cairo.  It really doesn’t say anything about why.  Another website, shoah dot org, has a story from 2013 celebrating the Prime Minister’s death 42 years later, calling him a traitor because he was in favor of the existence of Israel.  A Zionist, by definition.  As long as Zionist and traitor mean the same thing in the Arab world, Arab children won’t know any better.

2002
Suicide bombers blow up an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa, Kenya; their colleagues fail in their attempt to bring down Arkia Israel Airlines Flight 582 with surface-to-air-missiles.  That was more than 20 years ago.  Israel and anything or anyone associated with it is today a target for violence, including the United States of America.  That includes many American citizens who support Hamas, whether they know it or not.

2006
The Canadian House of Commons endorses Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s motion to declare Quebec a nation within a unified Canada.  Quebec is the largest province of Canada, and is largely French-speaking.  You would think that all the boundaries in Canada would be cemented by now, but believe it or not, Quebec is actually in a border dispute with its fellow Canadian province, Labrador.  The boundaries of Quebec have been changing since the mid-1700’s, and especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  But being declared a nation within a country was a high point for what was until then a mere Province.  Now that it has nation status, it’s trying to claim land from another.  So, for those who thought a two-state solution would work in Canada, we’ll see.  There are those who think a two-state solution will work for Israel and the Palestinians.  It’s not exactly the same thing, but might be a case study for moving forward after Hamas is eliminated and a new government is decided by the people of Gaza.

This week in 2018, I quit smoking cigarettes.  I had smoked cigarettes since I was 13 years old.  I would tell the guy at the store they were for my uncle, but he knew they were for me.  Back then, in 1975, they didn’t really care.  I didn’t smoke a lot.  In fact, I wouldn’t even keep them on me.  I would hide them outside, along with a pack of matches, somewhere where I hoped they wouldn’t get wet, or even damp overnight.  My cousins and I would wander off into nearby woods to smoke.  We would experience the intoxication that came with the ingestion of nicotine.  During the school year, smoking was more of a challenge, as schools didn’t allow it.  Still, we found a way.  Outside at lunchtime, in the stairways or restrooms in between classes.  It was a lot of work to smoke during school hours.  Prices for cigarettes started to increase in the late 70’s and early 80’s.  I remember telling myself that I would quit when they got over a dollar a pack.  I didn’t.  But then I joined the military, and got discounts on cigarettes.  You’re not allowed to smoke in basic training in the Air Force anymore, or so I’m told, but back then you could, and they even had designated areas for it and special accommodations for those of us who did.  By then I was hooked.  I don’t have an addictive personality or physiology.  Thank God.  But cigarettes was a real challenge for me once I discovered I wanted to quit.  To be clear, I never really wanted to quit.  I enjoyed smoking cigarettes.  My brand of choice was Marlboro.  I was never a big fan of menthol.  
I came close to quitting once when I was in the hospital for six days, and not allowed to smoke the whole time.  While I was there, they gave me nicotine patches.  They worked well, as long as I wasn’t allowed to go outside.  Once I was independent again, I would smoke cigarettes while wearing the nicotine patches.  So, they didn’t work for me because I didn’t have the self-discipline to let them help me.  
Then, gradually, I realized I couldn’t laugh out loud without coughing.  I love to laugh.  I love to make others laugh.  I love to laugh with others.  If I were unable to laugh out loud without suffering, how long might it be until I no longer desired to laugh?  I knew I had to quit smoking cigarettes if I wanted to laugh for the rest of my life.
My doctor prescribed me Chantix.  It worked for me.  It may or may not work for you, but five years later, I’m glad I quit.  After 40 plus years of smoking, I couldn’t imagine myself without a cigarette.  After 5 years of not smoking, I can’t imagine being a smoker again.  
I quit smoking by using a drug that let me quit gradually.  In that spirit, I would occasionally smoke a cigarette after I officially quit.  For a few years after I quit, I would bum a smoke off someone I knew just to see how it felt to smoke it.  I would always imagine the first puff would be quite satisfying, as if my body would be grateful that I once again supplied it with the intoxicating nicotine it had been missing.  At first every 3 to 4 months, then every 4 to 5 months and then every 5 to six months until one day I smoked a cigarette and it make me physically ill.  I haven’t smoked another one since.  It’s never too late to quit.  I know how hard it is to quit.  But it’s worth it.  
At today’s prices, I save about 300 dollars a month, my clothes don’t smell, the interior of my car stays cleaner, my wife is more happy to kiss me, and I don’t cough when I laugh.  The best part is, nobody had ever said to me, “I miss seeing you with a cigarette in your hand.”  Even though I couldn’t picture myself as a non-smoker, it turns out that everybody else already was.  I don’t care how old you are, it’s never too late to stop smoking cigarettes.   

Phone and email liner

I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but where I live, all kinds of businesses are charging you an extra three percent of your purchase price when you use a credit card.  The other day, the place where I buy my beer charged me an extra three percent for using my debit card.  I know it’s not a new idea, but lately it seems a lot more places are charging us more money to use our own money when we us our own money in the form of plastic instead of paper and metal.  
I could come up with all kinds of metaphors to parody the idea of being charged money to use money.  Sales taxes are one form of it.  Regardless of how you feel about sales taxes, at the very least you hope the money is being used to fund something that benefits the community where you live.  
But this three percent tax levied by retailers is a different animal altogether.  This is a tax put on us by some other entity than the government.  The question is who?  In who’s pocket does that extra three percent go?  It certainly isn’t being used to build roads and bridges.  Well, it’s the local beer store or the men’s wear store or some other mom and pop, locally owned and operated business that’s charging us the extra three percent.  It isn’t Walmart or Target.  So what’s the deal?  Did mom and pop businesses take advantage of the growing “shop local” trend and add a surcharge for supporting your local businesses?  No.  That’s not it.  Even places that aren’t retail, but still considered a small business, have also begun adding the charge.  Even non-profit places like thrift stores have put a penalty on using plastic to pay the bill.  I spoke to a trusted business man I know, and he explained it to me.  He said that each time a customer uses a credit card to pay the bill, the company that supports the card charges them a fee to make the transaction.  Well, that makes sense because it is a service that company provides.  As a customer, you have the convenience of inserting or tapping or sliding a piece of plastic through a machine instead of carrying cash for your transactions.  Now, I get that some transactions are too big for cash, unless you’re a drug dealer.  But in the cases where cash wouldn’t be appropriate in the legale world, you’re probably not going to be charged an extra three percent, either.  It’s only in the small to medium businesses where we find the extra charge.  I don’t know why Walmart doesn’t do it.  Maybe they accept it as a cost of doing business or massage it in to the prices we pay.  Maybe they have the clout to negotiate with the credit card companies.  The single-proprietor company has limited and similar choices when it comes to the banks and credit card companies with which they choose to work.  When all is said and done, 3 percent is the surcharge of choice to make up for the cost of doing business through a bank or credit card company instead of paying cash.  The business owner told me he gets charged at least three percent of the transaction to process the payment.  So the business isn’t getting a cut of the surcharge.  And I specifically asked him who gets a cut.  
Before we get into who gets a cut, let’s learn a little more about the pie, shall we?  You and I both know that billions of dollars change hands every day in America in one form of trade or another.  Most of it is done in the form of bank transactions.  Certainly all the big stuff.  And the banks get a commission for completing the transactions, as do the brokers and the lawyers the brokers have on retainer.  That’s always been the case.  But over the years, everyday people began using credit cards to make every day purchases.   The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco says that in 2021, 57% of payments were made with credit or debit cards.  I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds here, but imagine getting even a sliver of a percent of every credit card transaction that takes place every day in the United States alone.  Six and a half billion dollars was spent on retail in the US in 2022.  Fifty seven percent of that is three point seven billion.  Not all of that was subject to a three percent surcharge, but if it were, it would be over a hundred eleven million dollars a year.  Added on to the cost of a thirty-pack or a hoagie or a commercial on the radio.  Three percent added to the cost of dining out or buying a football for your kid for Christmas.  
Now that we have an idea about the size of the pie, how does it get divided up?  It turns out that each credit card company has its own price structure, each bank has its own policies and percentages.  The business man I spoke to said that regardless of which, it’s at least three percent of each transaction.  It wasn’t always this way, but in the past, the percentage was so low that a business owner could accept it as a cost of doing business.  At three percent, it’s literally eating away at the profit margin.  Small businesses had no choice but to add a surcharge onto credit and debit card purchases.  As for who gets a cut, it’s basically two different entities.  The banks and credit card companies, which are one entity, and those of us who use the cards.  The banks and credit card companies, which are virtually the same thing, take a cut of every transaction to pay for their overhead, staffing, electronics and office space and all the other things they need to provide the service that lets you swipe a card to buy whatever you need.  Plus they deserve to make a profit for providing the service.  But that’s not where all of the money goes.  Ever wonder where the cash back comes from that your credit card promises you on some or all of your purchases using their card?  Ever wonder where the points for free air fare or hotel stays comes from when you use this card or that one?  Part of that three percent surcharge is redistributed among the people using the cards.  But only the people using the right cards.  If you have a poor credit score and can’t get a credit card that offers points or cash back, you’re being charged to pay for points and perks for people who have better credit than you.  Every time you’re charged to use a debit card that doesn’t have any point system, you’re paying for somebody else to take a trip to Jamaica.  That reminds me of an old joke.  Bob says, “Hey, Joe, my wife went to the West Indies.”  Joe says, “Oh, yea, Jamaica?”  and Bob says, “Naw, she wanted to go.”
I know I don’t often give advice on this program, but I’m going to on this occasion.  Over the past several decades, there’s been a vision of a future with a cashless economy.  It was what the future looked like.  You’d walk into a store and pick up what you wanted and walked out, and the cost of the items would automatically be deducted from your bank account.  You bank account would have money in it because you have direct deposit.  All the work you do is rewarded by a number on a spread sheet or an email with your new balance.  
There was a time when penny candy cost a penny.  A hundred of them would cost you a dollar.  With that tax in Pennsylvania, it would now cost an extra six pennies if you paid cash, and another three additional pennies if you paid with a credit or debit card.  That’s nine pieces of candy you don’t get.  Six of those pieces of candy might go to build roads, but three of them are putting gas into someone else’s car and paying a bank executive.  If you use cash, you decide.  
Is it any wonder there’s a push for a cashless society?  Is it any wonder the federal government advocates digital currency?  There’s millions of dollars to be made for just being a middle-man.  Millions of your dollars used to reward the companies that create the ways for us to more easily spend our money.  Did you know that credit card and debit card transactions are significantly higher than cash transactions?  When you spend cash, the average is 22 dollars, as compared to 57 dollars per transaction when using plastic.  More than double.  One can easily see that there’s money to be made here.  As for that extra three percent, it generally gets split up as one percent for the consumer in the form of rebates and points or cash back, and two percent for the bank and credit card companies.
If we, as a group of consumers, were to return to a cash-dominant economy on the local level, we could return three percent of what we spend to the communities in which we live instead of paying for bank executives and perks for the people with good credit.  Nothing against the people with good credit, but I don’t think it’s right for people who don’t have perks on their debit or credit cards to be paying for the perks on other people’s credit cards.  Three percent may not sound like a lot but when it’s three percent of 6 trillion, then we can probably find a better way to use that money than to give to banks to hand out to their best customers.  If we go back to a cash-first mentality, we’ll get more for our money, have more control over who gets our money, and maintain the power to keep most of our transactions private if we so choose.  When you use your rewards card at the super market or the convenience store, you’re not keeping any secrets.  But keeping a third party out of the loop when making the financial transaction will not only save you money, but will also give you more control over where your money goes and who gets to use it.  When you pay a three percent fee to use plastic instead of paper, your paying three percent more to use your own money.  Where I live, there’s a state sales tax of six percent on most everything but clothes, unprepared food and lottery tickets.  With the exception of the lottery tickets, which they don’t let you buy with a credit card, just cash or a debit card, you’re now paying a nine percent fee for the privilege of buying a product on the open market.  So, for every 25 bucks you spend, you’re being charged another two dollars and 25 cents if you pay with plastic.
Yes, there are advantages to using a credit card as long as you don’t get charged extra at the point of purchase for using it.  I’m not just talking about the perks and cash-back options.  I’m talking about the built-in security measures that come with it.  If someone steals your credit card, you can report it, and if you’re lucky, it didn’t get used before you reported it.  If you’re really lucky, the credit card company won’t hold you responsible for the purchases you didn’t make.  Take it from me.  I had that happen once, right before Christmas one year.  My bank card was stolen and used to do somebody else’s Christmas shopping.  They caught the people who did it, and I wasn’t held responsible for the charges.  But if cash is stolen from you, it’s probably gone forever.  It’s not wise to carry large sums of cash on you.  But I think it’s worth it to change our spending habits to more of a cash-centric model.  My word processor is telling me there’s no such thing as “cash-centric” that’s with a hyphen between cash and centric, so I’m claiming the term.  Returning to a cash-centric society will benefit all of us, not just those of us with credit good enough to get perks for spending our money with plastic instead of paper.  The people who shop at the local mom and pop stores won’t be getting charged extra for using their own money.  We’ll all get more value out of the money we have.  Our transactions will be more private.  It’s worth the extra time to stop at the ATM on your way to the restaurant to get the cash you’ll need for your check and the tip.  As I mentioned earlier, the average cash transaction is 22 dollars, so you don’t need to keep a lot of cash on you.  If you keep 20 bucks on you, and somebody takes your money, you lost 20 bucks.  But if you pay an extra three percent of every purchase you make with a credit card, you lose 20 bucks with every 667 dollars you spend.
That could be just the beginning.  As you know, once somebody figures out a way to take our money, somebody else will figure out a way to add to it.  If we become a society of digital currency, there will be other fees we’ll need to pay in order to use the money we earn.  Once the banks and the government have control of our transactions, they can levy any kind of fee they can appear to justify.  Like gas taxes and cigarette taxes and alcohol taxes and sales taxes, we’ll be charged money to use our money if we succumb to a digital currency.  Digital currency is a dangerous road, as has been demonstrated by the recent guilty plea of the CEO of one of the largest digital currency brokers for breaking the Banking Secrecy Act, with another found guilty of fraud.  If you don’t want to use cash, then you should have that option.  But for those of us who do want to use cash, it’s important for our government to know they have a responsibility to create the cash we need to make public and private transactions without the government or a private company being able to track that purchase.  It’s important for one person to pay another person for goods or services without the so-called help of a third party.  It’s part of our freedom to be able to do so.
So let’s do ourselves a favor.  Let’s take back a part of our freedom that’s slowly been taken away by financial institutions.  Let’s take back the money that’s been slowly taken away by financial institutions.  If we start paying cash for our transactions again, we can just put one percent of our spending into a savings account to pay for our trip to Jamaica instead of having a credit card company charge us three percent to save it for us.  

The Listening Tube is written and produced by yours truly.  Copyright 2023.  Thank you for putting your ear to the Listening Tube.  Subscribe today.  I’m your host, Bob Woodley for thou ad infinitum.