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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

It is interesting that the first thing society makes frictionless with technology is payments, easing consumerism. Perhaps we should have aimed to make other things frictionless, such as: seeking good medical and dental care, buying less disposable packaging, choosing products that are sustainable. Or what about spending time in nature? That should be easy for everyone with a safe and decent-sized park within walking distance of anyone's home.

Nope, it's consumerism that we are easing. It goes to show you the true priorities of the techno-industrial society!

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This is an overly cynical view in my opinion. Firstly, payments is certainly not the first thing we made frictionless using technology. Reducing friction for things is not at all a new trend. Heck, just take a closer look at the device being used for Apple Pay: a Cell Phone! A technology that made it easier to talk to anybody, anywhere!

Secondly, automating payments is just an easier accomplishment than automating access to healthcare. With healthcare, you need to find the right provider, and do a bunch of other non-trivial things. Payments boils down to moving numbers from one ledger to another which is much easier. So of course society accomplished that before automating access to healthcare. It does not at all mean that society doesn't value healthcare

The first thing made frictionless by the Internet is probably communications. And yes payments is something that can be solved mostly inside of a computer so it's much simpler than healthcare.

> A technology that made it easier to talk to anybody, anywhere!

Seems like the phone made it easier to disconnect from the people around us by giving us too many options, IMO. It's more just to ease commercialism.

I am 37 years old and I have never ever found payments to have any friction, my 1950s/1960s parents feel the same with the credit card being the last significant technological advancement.

All the rest have been many but minor quality of life improvements here and there, but payments have been frictionless for as long as I remember.

Using my phone to pay is pretty low friction. There's literal friction to pulling anything out, but the phone comes out much more easily than the financial xenomorph of pulling my wallet out, then pulling a card out of the wallet. Then I have to stab the chip end in a reader since I have yet to find one that supports tap to pay.

As somebody who has a broken wrist right now: yes, it’s A LOT easier and frictionless to use phone than having to pull out/put back in a card.

I dropped my phone a couple inches into a rug and now it’s covered in tiny glass shards so I’d have to disagree. Hope your wrist heals up soon.

Then don’t drop your phones

I changed my mind about your wrist.

Keep the card in the pocket directly.

It’s even easier to tap my smart watch! I love it and I feel more secure than getting my card out.

> I have yet to find one that supports tap to pay

Interesting. I haven't seen one in years that doesn't support it in the US. Most of the time even when I hand my card to a cashier because the terminal is by them, they tend to tap it.

I was at a Walgreens once where they had it disabled and the cashier sighed and said the manager disabled it because tap incurred a slightly higher processing fee than inserting the card. This was a couple of years ago and not sure if it's true, but that's what the cashier said the manager said.

Taking your example of visiting a park: due to technology (having a device like a smartphone), I can arrive in a town and immediately see visually in which direction to walk so that I get to a park, having never set foot in the place before (I literally did this yesterday). Without that technology, this would only be possible after finding a shop which sells maps of the locality. Which is the more consumerist situation?

But phones aren't free, they have both significant up-front and recurring expenses. Trading "I need to buy a map" for "I need to buy a phone so I can look at a map" isn't a straight win.

And at the same time, before phones, every municipality had a place with free maps of major landmarks, precisely because they want to encourage tourism without forcing people to buy a local map.

The situation of needing to own a phone in order to participate in society is similar to how here in the US we require people to own cars to participate in society; it is a financial burden whose effects are felt disproportionately by those who are less wealthy.

Which resulted in a lot of paper maps being produced and thrown away, so not everything only has upsides. Just like camping ground guides that came out yearly, street maps that had to be re-bought every few years etc.

If we're going to continue the comparison, how many phones are produced and thrown away yearly?

I'm not trying to demonize phones, I'm trying to make us conscious of the phone-shaped blind spot in our collective consciousness. Phones aren't zero-impact.

Your examples don't make sense to me. Everything you list is either something which was made frictionless by the invention of the web (searching for doctors and dentists, choosing sustainable products) or something that cannot be made frictionless by technology, only by government (building more parks).

The article seems to define frictionless as "significantly improved", so maybe that's where the confusion lies. Their example of a frictionless technology is something that takes 30 seconds using a phone versus 40 seconds using a credit card. I'd take issue with whether that really means without friction, or even whether that's a significant improvement at all, but that is their definition, so I'm going with it.

All of these things (healthcare, buying products...) require money transfer. So by making payments frictionless, you're diminishing friction in these things too.

Healthcare does not require money transfer for the consumer. (Well in a non third world country).

> Healthcare does not require money transfer for the consumer. (Well in a non third world country).

I think the commenter was suggesting that by making health care frictionless people are more likely to use it.

There is ultimately money going from consumer to health care provider - whether that's later with an invoice or indirectly via payments to insurance company and from them to the health provider (or taxes for a government provided healthcare). But if you don't have to get out your credit card on each doctors visit, people will go more often.

Healthcare, and other issues you care about, are not immune to the laws of supply and demand just because you slapped your "this is important gang" sticker on it.

Healthcare will always require money transfer.

Money transfer is not required from the person who is ill. I am in the UK and if I am ill I don't pay anyone to go to hospital. I have already paid through taxes and national insurance and those get deducted from my pay packet by my employer so for me and many in the Western world phone payments are not relevant for healthcare.

There have been attempts at making it easier to seek medical care. There are services which give you online access to quick scheduling and even online prescriptions for common problems. I think the major barriers are due to regulations and inflexibility of existing structures.

I think that the increasing role of physician assistants could could make health care more affordable and thus reduce friction. There's a lot of common ailments that people seek treatment for that have a prescribed treatment protocol that doesn't require a specialist MD. In theory it should make healthcare more affordable to people since PA's don't make as much as doctors and don't require as much schooling. What I'm not sure about is whether the consumer is seeing any of the cost savings, or is it all getting captured by hospitals/intermediaries?

My primary care pretty much switched to supervising a few PAs in his practice and I've been pretty happy with the quality and price.

I didn't even know that PAs existed when I went to school because I think it would have been a decent career for myself. I think about it as an alternative plan after the next time I get laid off.

You're not going far enough. Canada allowed Pharmacists to do diagnosis + prescription for some common over the counter meds with minor side effects.

> It is interesting that the first thing society makes frictionless with technology is payments, easing consumerism. Perhaps we should have aimed to make other things frictionless

By "society" and "we" I assume you are talking about American society?

Because there are many societies that prioritize and in fact have already done these things.

One could argue that America lags far behind other much more modern societies in virtually every metric that isn't "number of billionaires"

Welcome to capitalism!

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