A card-carrying fan of contactless, I'm now contactless-less

A card-carrying fan of contactless, I'm now contactless-less – and it's not fun

In the first half of 2015, £2.5bn was spent in the UK using contactless cards. I’ve lost mine, and I’m now living life in the slow lane

Here is my problem. I have lost my debit card. This might seem like a minor hindrance. I haven’t, say, lost a limb. But I have lost the means to go about my everyday life as I usually would.

I rely on my contactless debit card as if it were a chip in my wrist. (And I don’t have a credit card, because I was always taught never to have credit cards.)

I use my contactless debit card for everything. When I encounter people who do not have contactless, I reel in horror. It’s almost as if they don’t have mobile phones. Or faces.

I get wildly irritated by shops and pubs that do not accept card payments, because it’s 2016. In supermarkets, if I have to use chip and pin, I can barely contain my fury. In a world in which being five minutes late to a tweet is considered embarrassingly tardy, it takes an awfully long time to use a chip and pin machine.

It has been estimated that contactless payment can halve the time it takes to pay with cash, but in my opinion, that’s a conservative estimate. Contactless is like swimming in liquid gold; cash is wading through treacle.

Published By - Theguardian.com - Sports New, LifeStyle News, Politics news, UK and world political comment and analysis: Friday 22 April 2016 15.28 BST

Comments

Over 40M people of Irish descent are in the United States, 8x more than the population of Ireland

The Irish people (Irish: Muintir na hÉireann or Na hÉireannaigh) are a nation and ethnic group native to the island of Ireland, who share a common Irish ancestry, identity and culture. Ireland has been inhabited for about 9,000 years according to archaeological studies (see Prehistoric Ireland). For most of Ireland's recorded history, the Irish have been primarily a Gaelic people (see Gaelic Ireland). Anglo-Normans conquered parts of Ireland in the 12th century, while England's 16th/17th century (re)conquest and colonization of Ireland brought a large number of English and Lowland Scots to parts of the island, especially the north. Today, Ireland is made up of the Republic of Ireland (an independent state), and the smaller Northern Ireland (a part of the United Kingdom). The people of Northern Ireland hold various national identities; including Irish, Northern Irish, British, or some combination thereof. The Irish have their own customs, language, music, dance, sports, cuisine,

TIL: On his second day in office, President Jimmy Carter pardoned all evaders of the Vietnam War drafts

This article is about the 39th President of the United States. For the submarine, see USS Jimmy Carter (SSN-23). "James Earl Carter" redirects here. For his father, see James Earl Carter Sr. James Earl "Jimmy" Carter Jr. (born October 1, 1924) is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States from 1977 to 1981. In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the Carter Center. Carter was a Democrat who was raised in rural Georgia. He was a peanut farmer who served two terms as a Georgia State Senator from 1963 to 1967, and one as the Governor of Georgia from 1971 to 1975. He was elected President in 1976, defeating incumbent President Gerald Ford in a relatively close election; the Electoral College margin of 57 votes was the closest at that time since 1916. On his second day in office, Carter pardoned all evaders of the Vietnam War drafts. During Carter's term as President, two new cabinet-level departments, the Dep

TIL the first animal to ask an existential question was from a parrot named Alex. He asked what color he was, and learned that it was "grey".

Alex (1976 – 6 September 2007) was an African grey parrot and the subject of a thirty-year (1977–2007) experiment by animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg, initially at the University of Arizona and later at Harvard University and Brandeis University. When Alex was about one year old, Pepperberg bought him at a pet shop. The name "Alex" was a backronym for avian language experiment, or avian learning experiment. Before Pepperberg's work with Alex, it was widely believed in the scientific community that a large primate brain was needed to handle complex problems related to language and understanding; birds were not considered to be intelligent, as their only common use of communication was mimicking and repeating sounds to interact with each other. However, Alex's accomplishments supported the idea that birds may be able to reason on a basic level and use words creatively. Pepperberg wrote that Alex's intelligence was on a level similar to dolphins and great apes. S

Bol News

Search This Blog