02.00am McDonald's Motorbike Run from Pratumnak to Marine Plaza, Walking Street, Pattaya, Thailand

[@eric81766]

11:58 The Pattaya sign is cool. Everything seems so clean and I didn't see any homeless people menacing about. Every time you show that payment system it's wild that we don't have that in the USA. From some quick googling, it seems the government got involved in making the payment system and it didn't wind up with the government taking a huge cut of the transactions for itself.

[@FreeTheAnimal]

It's basically all over Asia. They have always been cash based. Even back in the day when I lived in Japan (late 80s) there was no check writing (so no "float" for the banks to use). Big companies in Tokyo had guys riding bikes with huge amounts of cash crisscrossing the city to settle invoices. So to an Asian, "paid" means it's not mine anymore and it's yours, and right now. It's not "I give it to the bank, the bank keeps it for 3-5 days, then gives it to you." Totally foreign concept to them. So, when they finally did electronic systems, they leapfrogged and everything is instant settlement 24/7/365.

[@eric81766]

@@FreeTheAnimal It seems the essence is: If you start with honesty, then it's too noticeable when someone tries to inject dishonesty so it doesn't happen. Whereas in the USA there's layers of dishonesty that have been piled upon previous layers of dishonesty so nobody feels bad adding a little more dishonesty to the mix. (Ex: Nobody knows how much badness is wrapped up in Buy Now Pay Later schemes because they don't show up in reports.) The broken windows theory applied to transactions.