Month: March 2024

Why Online Payment Killed Paper Money

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Shops often prepare a large amount of change to cope with customers using large bills. This change comes from the bank’s change exchange service, and merchants need to go to the bank to exchange it. However, the process is relatively cumbersome and usually requires advance reservation. If you want to deposit a large amount of change, you may even be charged with “disrupting financial order” by the bank……

The main way for ordinary people to obtain banknotes is to withdraw their salary from an ATM. However, the vast majority of ATMs can only deposit and withdraw 100 yuan (a small number can), so if you take a 100 yuan bill to a small shop to buy a bottle of water, you may be refused or asked if you have change. Then consumers are more willing to use online payment, and shops do not need to exchange too much change.

PS: In Europe and the United States, ATMs that can withdraw 5, 10, and 20 denominations are more common, and Japan can also withdraw 1000 denominations. This kind of detail will increase the operating cost of ATMs, but it also reduces the user’s cost, so the circulation of paper money in these places is still relatively high.

PS 2: Still the theme of the day before yesterday, there are few supporting facilities for paper money, which is only a superficial paper money. Then the paper money replacement tools developed by private enterprises are very competitive and kill the paper money.

Referenced the Zhihu answer of Chong Zigong’s wealth acquisition.

Some Interesting Topics About Paper Money

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【Large Denomination Banknotes】The largest denominations of US dollars, Euros, and Japanese Yen are 100, 200, and 10000, respectively. However, the 200 Euro note is not popular; if we only consider the popular 100 Euro note, their values are approximately 722, 778, and 477 RMB, respectively. Therefore, issuing a 500 Yuan denomination banknote should be a reasonable design.

【Bill Counter】Former bank executive 韦杰夫 stated, “In the United States, a bank may only have one bill counter, while in China, every teller has one.”

【Currency Detector】Counterfeit currency is rare in Japan, so ordinary Japanese stores do not use currency detectors, and there isn’t even a Japanese Wikipedia entry for it. However, there are very few languages with entries for currency detectors, only 6: English, Russian, Ukrainian, German, French, and Italian.

【Cash Transactions】More than a decade ago, a small number of consumers directly used large amounts of cash for down payments on homes, cars, and other large transactions. Although not common, it was quite peculiar.

P.S. The low adoption rate of debit and credit card spending in the past, along with the popularity of savings passbooks, may have been caused by the previously mentioned “reluctance to use good things.” The emergence of e-commerce and mobile payments accelerated the move away from cash, but now it’s becoming too cashless; some places even refuse to accept cash.

Why Are We Afraid to Use Good Things?

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In the article 《好东西不敢用》, it mentions the convenience of postage meters and personal checks, but they are not promoted for personal use in China, which is related to the lack of a credit culture in the local area.

First, let me introduce the postage meter, which is an alternative to stamps. Customers price their own mail and then print it in the form of a stamp in the position of the stamp. Early postage meters had hardware counters, and the counters needed to be reset at the post office after the quota was used up. The costs are roughly divided into two parts: postage meter rental and prepaid quota.

For companies that need to mail a large number of letters and goods, renting a postage meter can save a lot of time. However, ordinary people don’t need it, so there is something wrong with the original statement. However, postage meters are indeed used in China, but they are installed in post offices, and the post office clerks are unwilling to use them because it’s troublesome…

The problem of personal checks is probably more complicated. On December 18, 2002, the first transaction using a personal check in Beijing occurred. A year later, there were only about 300 users who applied for personal check business. After that, many banks stopped the personal check business. However, the main responsibility should still lie with the banks, because applying for personal check business requires a deposit of more than 100,000 yuan and a monthly income of more than 5,000 yuan. 《北京青年报》 also mentioned the reason that “China’s social credit foundation is still relatively weak”.

gledos believes that the article 《好东西不敢用》 got the reason wrong. The fundamental problem should be the monopoly. In the past, the postal system was basically a monopoly. Without competition, there was no motivation to introduce advanced experience until private express delivery used advanced management and technology to seize the postal market.

The result is a shoddy team, only in name. Even the urban underground municipal infrastructure lacks a complete map. In recent years, professional underground pipeline detectors, ground penetrating radar, and underground three-dimensional spatial scanners have been used to redraw the map. (No wonder construction often cuts off some pipelines. It turns out that this is opening a blind box)

Twice-Exceptional Students

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Educators are more likely to recognize student traits such as learning disabilities and giftedness. However, gifted students with learning disabilities are discovered later, around the 1970s.

In the 1990s, such students were given a specific name: twice exceptional (hereinafter referred to as 2e). 2e can easily be misunderstood because the disadvantages may not be apparent at first, so they may be considered very smart in their early years. But then learning disabilities such as dyslexia, dyscalculia, ADHD, DCD, and poor memory begin to directly or indirectly hold them back. 2e may then be considered lazy and not working hard enough.

Researchers estimate that the number of 2e in the United States accounts for approximately 0.5% of the total number of children, which is not a small number. However, only a small number of schools can provide suitable educational resources for 2e. It would be great if this problem could be properly addressed.

Why Is 1.0 Considered Normal Vision?

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1.0 on the eye chart, or 20/20, 6/6, and 5.0, are all referred to as standard vision. From a design perspective, this number represents the font that the human eye can recognize with a side length of 5 arcminutes and a stroke interval of 1 arcminute. Taking the common standard logarithmic visual acuity chart as an example, it means identifying the E with a side length of 7.27 mm and a stroke interval of 1.454 mm at a distance of 5 meters.

Why choose a side length of 5 arcminutes and a text stroke interval of 1 arcminute as the standard vision? The answer is that ophthalmologist Herman Snellen designed it casually (maybe he did some statistics and then chose it for the convenience of calculation). The purpose should be for efficiency. After all, early vision tests ended when 1.0 was reached, so the vision chart at that time did not have smaller test characters than 1.0.

However, the 1.0 that used to be used to comment on general/normal vision may now be excellent vision, because the myopia rate of modern people is quite high compared to the past, and even the vision of most East Asian student groups may not reach 1.0.

P.S.: The eye chart can only test the smallest distinguishable two contours that can be identified, which is not the same as testing the eye resolution. Therefore, not all retina screens exceed the limit of the human eye. (John Hable)

P.S. 2: The statistically extreme vision is 20/8.9 (2.25), which is also close to the theoretical limit. If the cone cell density and lens are perfect, then the strongest vision may be 20/7.1 (2.8), maybe this is the only way to see Venus as a crescent .?

Referenced Paulus T. V. M. de Jong’s paper A history of visual acuity testing and optotypes.

Image Comparison Slider

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The demonstration short film on the cover is an image comparison slider, the origin of which is somewhat untraceable. However, the popular source can still be found: ZURB. ZURB is a web design company that has also achieved considerable success in the open source field, such as the responsive front-end framework foundatio.

In June 2013, when ZURB was improving the headless browser screenshot tool, they needed to show the visual differences between two images. The conventional method was not effective enough (as troublesome as a “spot the difference” game), so the design director recommended the counterfeit comparison page of the Canada Goose website.

On this page, users can move the slider to accurately compare the differences in the same position of two images. Then ZURB developers used jQuery to replicate this function and thought this tool was very practical, so after perfecting it, they open sourced it to GitHub, named TwentyTwenty.

P.S.: TwentyTwenty means normal vision, because 20/20 means seeing the content of theoretically normal vision at a distance of 20 feet, which is 1.0 vision. (This shows that the “spot the difference” game is indeed troublesome.)

Source: You can go to ggame to view it.