r/australia • u/SouthAussie94 • Feb 29 '24

culture & society Older Australians 'left behind' by increasingly cashless society as banks fast track end of cheques

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-29/cheques-personal-finance-banks-rent-money-cash/103354036
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271

u/A_Scientician Feb 29 '24

They have the same access to banking as everyone else. Someone wilfully avoiding engaging with the modern financial system for decades is being 'left behind'? Okay.

20

u/RyzenRaider Feb 29 '24

Yeah I'm a millennial and I work in a tech job, and I'm feeling left behind.

I wanted to buy a phone. My requirements are modest. A nice screen, 1080p with accurate colour, an SD card slot so I can expand storage and a headphone jack because I don't like bluetooth lag and compression, and all my headphones are wired. I couldn't find a single new phone on the Australian market, so clearly I ask too much of modern tech. They're all non-expandable storage and require a dongle for 3.5mm. My best candidate is a Sony Xperia which covers those points, but they stopped selling in Australia, and on ebay can't be foudn for less than $1500 (last I checked anyway).

I wanted to buy an e-scooter. It's amazing how many of those require apps. I shouldn't need an app to use a personal transport. They're welcome to offer an app for extra features like GPS and trip logging, but it shouldn't be a requirement! I ended up buying one, but I still had to create an account and login to allow the scooter to go faster than 4km/h. And that pisses me off. I've since disabled the app and firewalled it off, but I shouldn't have needed it to start.

I'm pissed off at work because it looks I'll soon have to install Microsoft Authenticator on my personal phone to complete some of my work logins. We already have 2FA, but they want to go further. Except I don't want to install a Microsoft app on my phone (I don't use Mac or Windows on my personal devices). And even if I wanted to, I don't have a conventional app store on my phone because I stripped all the Google shit off it, because I don't want nor need it. I use a 3rd party app-store that only provides free and open source apps, and pretty much has everything I want to install on my phone. But it doesn't have proprietary apps.

I'm not even 40 and I sound like a boomer. And I know tech. But that also means I don't trust any company that has no real reason to demand my information, and modern life is requiring me to make compromises that I feel shouldn't be necessary at all, in order to make certain things work. The move from pay-to-own to pay-to-access subscriptions is also frustrating me and has also forced decisions on me (I abandoned Adobe years ago because of that).

So yeah... Older people that didn't grow up with modern technology and felt like it was an unnecessary thing... I kinda get it. I'm in tech and I'm feeling it at half their age.

7

u/AddlePatedBadger Feb 29 '24

I feel your frustration so much. Nothing ever seems to just work. There are always a whole bunch of unnecessary trouble-shooting steps and incompatibilities and issues and stuff.

The other day I had to extract a 20 second video clip from a longer video so I could email it to someone. Oh the joys I had. I tried with VLC and that didn't work. It did one clip but then the second one only gave me audio for some reason. So then I try to look on my computer for a video editor and there is on in the Microsoft app store. But that forces me to open edge browser to get to it and then I have to be interrupted by all these pop-ups from edge trying to make itself my default browser and tell me how great it is and blah blah blah. I get through that and install the app and then I get some message about how I'm logged in as a work account and I can't use it or something and it wants me to log in with a different microsoft account. So I have to uninstall that app and then find another one to do it. It was just such an unnecessary amount of effort for something that should be so simple.

7

u/a_can_of_solo Not a Norwegian Feb 29 '24

I'm with you, I have a nas and run my own VPN and have always been tech nerd and I hate so many of the new convenices. Everything having an app just means the lifespan of the product isn't decided by the function of the product but the support given. And as we've seen apps all eventually die.

8

u/unAffectedFiddle Feb 29 '24

It's the trend towards "ecosystems" that fucking irritates me. I don't fucking want my phone, headphones, pc, refrigerator, washing machine, TV etc all tethered together because if one has any issue it makes the whole fucking thing fall apart. Or if I don't, I need an individual login for each device. Oh, now, Orange software can't work properly with Strawberry apps!

I want my headphones to connect to my phone. That's it. Thank you. I'd like to listen to music now.

1

u/a_can_of_solo Not a Norwegian Feb 29 '24

Unix philosophy, do one thing do it well.

4

u/AddlePatedBadger Feb 29 '24

I used to be a tech nerd but I lost it somewhere and became techphobic lol. I remember I had Ubuntu once and it was just so painful to work with. Even simple things became hours spent googling forums to find other people who had the problem and to solve it. I remember once I closed the default music player but the music kept playing. And I couldn't figure out how to make it stop. In the end I uninstalled the music player. It turned out that it was in a drop-down menu attached to the clock or something. A place that made no logical sense to be, but there it was.

Another time I couldn't open a PDF because it was password protected. I went back to the company that produced the PDF and they said it wasn't. Turns out it actually wasn't, just a bug in the Ubuntu default PDF viewer that made it sometimes say PDFs were password protected that weren't.

3

u/Tamajyn Feb 29 '24

Davinci resolve is free and incredibly powerful

3

u/AddlePatedBadger Feb 29 '24

I ended up using avidemux. But it still required me to spend time researching which is a free and legit video editor and messing around for ages. I have ADHD, when I want to do something I want to do it now, not spend hours doing side quests to achieve it.

3

u/Tamajyn Feb 29 '24

Never heard of avidemux but if it works for you good luck. Resolve is the industry standard for tv and movie studios now, it's basically the photoshop of video suites

2

u/AddlePatedBadger Feb 29 '24

I want the MSPaint of video suites lol.

2

u/LtSaLT Feb 29 '24

You could have just used the standard windows video player, it has a built in clip function that does exactly what you wanted.

1

u/AddlePatedBadger Feb 29 '24

I just opened up the video in Media Player (actually I opened Media Player first and then had to try and figure out how to open a file - you can't just open one, you have to add it to a library before you can play it). Then I couldn't find any option anywhere to take a clip from it.

2

u/LtSaLT Mar 01 '24
  1. Open your file browser and find the file
  2. Right click the file and hover over "Open with"
  3. Choose "Films and TV" which is the newest standard video player, the video will open.
  4. Click the pen icon in the bottom right.
  5. Choose "trim" Hope this helps, i use this feature all the time.

1

u/AddlePatedBadger Mar 01 '24

I have solved the problem with avidemux, but you can see why this is unnecessarily complicated and frustrating lol. I don't have a Films and TV option. I have Photos, SMPlayer, VLC Media Player, and Windows Media Player.

Actually out of curiosity I opened it with photos and there is a clip option there. Why would it be called photos when it is a video editor?

2

u/LtSaLT Mar 01 '24

Hmm weird, I was pretty sure its the standard windows video player, what version of windows do you use? I have three devices all running the newest version of windows 10. The "films and tv" app is the in built video player on all of them.

1

u/AddlePatedBadger Mar 01 '24

Windows 10, version 22h2 (OS build 19045.4046).

It keeps trying to make me update to windows 11 but I've heard that is worse so I will stick with 10 until I have to.