It's already eroded in many countries right? Gendered patronymic names used to be common here in Sweden - Katarina Gustavsdotter (Vasa) was the daughter of Gusav Eriksson (Vasa), who was the son of Erik Johansson (Vasa), &c. - but gendered patronymic names eventually became permanent last names that got inherited over multiple generations.
So now we have a few hundred thousand people with the last name Andersson, despite most of them not being Anders's son.
> Digital payments are very convenient and deeply integrated, so long as you have a local ID which allows you use the local payment system Swish etc.
Just to reiterate how ubiquitous Swish and BankID are here: 99.9% of Swedish residents age 18-67 have BankID (8.6M users), while Swish has 8.7M private users, and 93% of those users send or receive money via Swish at least once per month.
I'm in Sweden and the only time I've ever come in contact with a check was when an American company sent me one as a refund.
Most of these reasons just sound like fee-issues to me. I use a debit card (or Swish) to pay for everything and there's never a cheaper payment option. The fact that checks somehow cost less to use than debit/credit cards sounds ridiculous tbh, especially with all the added handling that must go into dealing with them (it just seems so inefficient).
That is partially why the banks/government in Sweden have been happy to phase it out. Companies also don't like dealing with cash because it requires extra accounting, security, and transportation. In the early 2000s there were about 50 cash transport robberies per year in Sweden, in 2018 there was 1.
> Companies also don't like dealing with cash because it requires extra accounting, security, and transportation.
At least in the US, individual businesses don't like dealing with credit because of the transaction fees but are kind of forced to thanks to everybody else taking credit everywhere.
Of course, the big chains love credit and are happy to pay the transaction cost because it lets them audit all the transactions and increase their control over local managers and employees. Presumably, the big chains also negotiate lower fees.
Swedbank offers debit cards to kids as young as seven [1]. Depending on the kid's age (and what the parents configure), there will be different limits on how much the kid can spend.
Swish is the de facto standard for sending money between individuals [2], and that's what grandparents tend to use to send money to their grandchildren.
It's fee-less (for person-to-person transfers use at least) and it connects your bank account with your phone number. So if anyone wants to send you money, they can just open Swish and enter your phone number (or scan a QR code) and send you some. You also have to sign the payment with the BankID app, which is the de facto standard for authentication [3].
And when I write de facto standard I really mean it. 99.9% of Swedish residents age 18-67 have BankID (8.6M users), while Swish has 8.7M private users (93% of which use Swish at least once per month).
This is also partially due to hacking incidents in recent years. In 2021, all 800 Coop grocery stores were closed for a few days due to the Kaseya VSA ransomware attack [1].
I find 100 kW a lot more tangible than some nonround number of thousands of kW times hours. People use kW for car charging, for heaters (toasters, microwaves, space heaters are all the same), etc. so you can directly say how many of those fit in the nice round 100 kW
But if you happen to know that a typical person in a rich country like you're probably in (5th percentile of the world population) uses about 1.5 MWh/year, I guess you can also approximate a MWh figure by saying 1 MWh/year is close enough, so I'd understand if someone says that works for them
> a typical person in a rich country [...] uses about 1.5 MWh/year
That's just electricity, not energy. The real figure is probably ballpark 50 to 100 percent higher (probably mainly depending on climate for heating/cooling demands and the heating method being used) but I haven't looked that up now. Just wanted to remark this (can't edit anymore) so it's no longer completely misleading
I totally agree. "kWh/year" might be what people in the industry use (some people still use British Thermal Units, in the USA ...) but for a scientifically literate lay person "about 100 kW" is far easier to understand than "about 880,000 kilowatt hours of electricity each year". (I hope I calculated that correctly.)
Despite being written in 2009, it certainly still feels relevant.
And thank you for posting this, because it made me think of Sir Noël Coward's banger song "There are bad times just around the corner" (1952) [1], which I hadn't listened to in years.
There are bad times just around the corner
There are dark clouds hurtling through the sky
And it's no good whining
About a silver lining
For we know from experience that they won't roll by
So now we have a few hundred thousand people with the last name Andersson, despite most of them not being Anders's son.