Yeah right. Of course. Cook was saying he wants to make it IMPOSIBLE for people to use cash. He wants to take away "legal tender". Yah. I know that's just what he was proposing.
What a frickn hyperbolic maroon.
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Apple Possibly Looking to Japanese Expertise to Improve Siri
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What a frickn hyperbolic maroon.
Any effort Apple can put into expanding Siri's usefulness is probably worthwhile. And has anybody else noticed that Siri on the Mac sounds just like the old voice commands speaker it's supposedly replacing?
Or in other words, sounds much worse than Siri in iOS 10? Siri in iOS at least sounds kinda natural, but on the Mac it's just completely robotic.
Or in other words, sounds much worse than Siri in iOS 10? Siri in iOS at least sounds kinda natural, but on the Mac it's just completely robotic.
I thought it was quite bizarre of a statement coming from him. It's probably just PR spin talk to throw a bone to the press so he wouldn't have to talk much about it. After all, Siri was designed as a voice search engine.
Quite ironic, isn't it? They buy Siri, strips it down to its core, hypes it up, and five years later goes to Japan for help on improving the AI aspects of it. Why didn't they go to them in the first place? Oh...right. The arrogance of thinking they could do it all.
Cash doesn't earn interest for me.
Using cash doesn't get me free airline flights and hotel rooms.
Cash offers no insurance if am physically robbed. (I care more about being physically robbed than my data being virtually robbed)
Cash costs too much to process, to handle, to secure, etc.
An anecdote:
A food truck I like used to be cash or credit. One day, their employee was robbed carrying their daily sales to the bank. It's not hard to imagine that walking the same few blocks every day carrying a few thousand dollars in cash would lead to becoming the target of a robbery. Fortunately the employee was not physically harmed.
The food truck owner obviously wanted to change something to ensure this never happened again. Hiring an armored truck to come to their main location was very expensive, and not feasible for a relatively small businesses, nor would it prevent a robbery on the food truck itself. The owner also figured out that it takes as much as 2-3 hours of time (paid hourly to employees) per day to count the cash and change, to bundle up the bills into large stacks, to roll the coins into rolls, and the slowdown during ordering.
It turned out that paying for credit card fees was less expensive by far than the cost of handling cash, and it completely removed his security issue. The food truck is now credit card only.
As I'm in my mid 40's, I'm not even part of the "current generation" they target with marketing/advertising anymore. But still, I rarely carry any cash - and increasingly find it frustrating when I happen upon a "cash only" situation, such as a highway toll booth for which I don't have whatever "easy-pass" system they support.
I'd hate to see cash disappear though, unless someone can create a truly 100% compatible replacement for it. (By that, I mean a substitute that's untraceable and doesn't cost either party to a transaction an additional processing fee.)
* I just edited this post because I realized I neglected to mention bitcoin. I know SOMEONE is going to bring it up as "the answer that's already here!" otherwise. No, bitcoin is NOT workable as a cash replacement for everybody. I was fascinated by crypto-currency myself and even did some mining for litecoin and other alt-coins. But the whole thing is so processor-intensive, it would quickly break down if every single transaction now done with cash moved over to it instead. The block-chains would grow incredibly huge and you wouldn't be able to complete a transaction without waiting hours or even days for it!
The problem is, at least in the United States, the government is way too "tax happy" to ever invest in a solution that they can't track/trace. And most likely, they'll get their way eliminating cash at some point by convincing people that the anonymous nature of cash is ONLY good for committing crimes (like selling illegal drugs). Only THEN will people realize what they lost, when they're automatically taxed each year on everything they sold at a garage or yard sale, etc. etc.
I'd hate to see cash disappear though, unless someone can create a truly 100% compatible replacement for it. (By that, I mean a substitute that's untraceable and doesn't cost either party to a transaction an additional processing fee.)
* I just edited this post because I realized I neglected to mention bitcoin. I know SOMEONE is going to bring it up as "the answer that's already here!" otherwise. No, bitcoin is NOT workable as a cash replacement for everybody. I was fascinated by crypto-currency myself and even did some mining for litecoin and other alt-coins. But the whole thing is so processor-intensive, it would quickly break down if every single transaction now done with cash moved over to it instead. The block-chains would grow incredibly huge and you wouldn't be able to complete a transaction without waiting hours or even days for it!
The problem is, at least in the United States, the government is way too "tax happy" to ever invest in a solution that they can't track/trace. And most likely, they'll get their way eliminating cash at some point by convincing people that the anonymous nature of cash is ONLY good for committing crimes (like selling illegal drugs). Only THEN will people realize what they lost, when they're automatically taxed each year on everything they sold at a garage or yard sale, etc. etc.
I want new macs but hearing crying MacRumors community on every single thread won't make it happen any faster, not to mention that is getting very irritating.
Glad to see that Apple at least acknowledges that Siri needs improvement. In my experience, its speech recognition particularly needs work. And no, I'm not habitually drunk and slurring my words
Agreed, I think it is not as simple as saying the consumer doesn't like cash.
It is more that they want the convenience.
For every day grocery shopping and similar small items, the convenience to pay with a card or Apple Pay is
obvious.
Nobody will bother to hack into a milk bill for $ 2.50 or Starbucks Lattes or McDonalds Big Macs.
With banks taking fees everywhere they can and pushing the work to the consumer doing their services online
it is obviously easier to use non cash.
Bank of America doesn't even have drive up tellers anymore, only "machines"
But cash also has it's issues. You lose it , it's gone. Can be stolen (In that case I'd prefer if they steal my date and I'll get to keep the cash) and there is a daily limit of $ 10,000 if you want to pay someplace with cash.
They'll still give you a receipt, so there again is your visibility.
Someplace in that "cash" chain somebody documents that transaction.
Several years back a neighboring company got a Fedex box with $ 20,000. The office manager gave it to the police.
Now if whoever sent that was upset and came after that office manager (Who originally signed for receiving that package and had his name posted with the FEDEX tracking info)
he could have been toast.
Even as an innocent bystander cash would have caused problems.
So, it's not as save as one might think.
I'm not a believer in "this should never happen because of this bad thing happening now"...the answer is to stop the bad thing happening now first.
AI =/= statistics
At the moment; all these "assistants" are just search programs with a little extra automation, and disguised in a speech-recognition wrapper.
At the moment; all these "assistants" are just search programs with a little extra automation, and disguised in a speech-recognition wrapper.
These types of anecdotes are fairly useless. For every one against cash, there's one for it. For example: Your food truck that went cashless. Customer info get's hacked like Target or so many other companies.
Anecdotes... everybody has 'em.
Well, Tim is a logistics wizard, trying to keep inventory low. That's why he loves "Services", and won't announce product updates as long as there are still large stocks of unsold components...
These types of anecdotes are fairly useless. For every one against cash, there's one for it. For example: Your food truck that went cashless. Customer info get's hacked like Target or so many other companies.
Anecdotes... everybody has 'em.
True. But compare the severity.
The Target data hack resulted in a bunch of credit card numbers being stolen, and their corresponding names and addresses. It's a big deal, but no one was physically hurt. Credit card companies had to issue those folks new cards and new numbers, and surely that caused some headache in changing billing details in some places. Other than the immediate loss in consumer confidence and brand name tarnishment, Target probably had to pay a lot to clean up the mess and might now be paying higher credit card fees for the trouble. All in all, most consumers were not really affected.
In my example, a specific person person was in real physical danger because of cash.
I'll take a hack, against which the credit card company protects me, over the dangers of cash any day.
In your example, no one was hurt either. The prospect of physical danger doesn't make one situation worse than the other. Just like the possibility of identity theft from a Target-like doesn't make it worse than physical danger. It's not an all or nothing proposition. Regardless, anecdotes don't prove one side or the other to be right.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the irony of the word "Siri" in Japanese...
(It means "butt" when given the honorific O prefix)
(It means "butt" when given the honorific O prefix)
For decades after WW-II, Japanese goods were seen as cheap copies of American tech. It takes a while for a country to recover and find its own feet.
Korea suffered greatly under foreign rule and attacks, and indeed has been technically in a state of war for the past sixty years, something that no other free country has had to deal with.
Give it all time.
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Unbelievable really - Japan ruled Korea from 1910 - 1945 - Japan surrenders to US in September 1945 and just 5 years later Japan is supplying military vehicles to the US to fight in the Korean War 1950-1953.
