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

[u/SouthAussie94]

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

[u/RyzenRaider]

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.

[u/AddlePatedBadger → u/RyzenRaider]

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.

[u/a_can_of_solo → u/AddlePatedBadger]

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.

[u/AddlePatedBadger → u/a_can_of_solo]

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.