Tea for me, but otherwise ... uh ... the 18 book pile next to my right elbow has room for roughly two more books of the same average thickness before it becomes a second pile.

0-fee CUs are approaching unicorn status. I'm jealous! :D

So kind of like Blackadder but with a whiny toddler voice instead of Brian Blessed's incredible booming voice?

To me this sounds like an argument against a capitalist-focused implementation of payment systems. Ones in which banks design the system, run the system, and take fees from the system at their leisure. (Interac, for example, takes fees too.)

What you need is a humane cashless payment system. One that doesn't lock out poor folk and charge ridiculous fees to both vendors and customers.

Where I live there are two major cashless payment systems and they are so ubiquitous that I haven't seen cash used in anger in over a decade. Indeed the last time I had local cash in my hand at all was last summer when I needed it to go to Canada, getting it exchanged for CAD on entry and then having to suffer through carrying around wads of cash, having an increasingly heavy and bulgy coin bag, all so I could do things that here would be the quick scan of a QR code or even just waving my phone in the general vicinity of a terminal. (Note: I saw the cash, carried the cash, but didn't use it here at all. I had it only to use in Canada. While still here the rest of my transactions were done the civilized way.)

It was quite the reverse culture shock, let me tell you.

I said that the systems here were ubiquitous. How ubiquitous you might ask? Street vendors with food carts use it. Small hole-in-the-wall restaurants and shops use them. Buskers use them: you just go up to the busker, look around for the QR code, scan it, and pay. No throwing change or bills.

So what are the fees like?

Most people will never see a fee. The one I use most, for example:

• I can withdraw up to the equivalent of about CA$4000 per month without a fee. (In local terms that's a ludicrous amount of money. If you've got the kind of money where you can routinely do this, you're well into "fuck off money" territory.) Anything over that limit is charged the onerous fee of 0.1%. (No, that's not a typo.)
• Note: that's withdraw. Paying for goods and services within the system are free, no cap.
• P2P transfers (end-user to end-user, not business) are capped to about that same CA$4000 per year and anything over that limit is charged that same 0.1%.
• On the commercial side, the transaction fee is typically around 0.6% per transaction.

It is interesting to note that I know all of these fees because they're clearly explained on my payment provider's terms of service and web site. (I also know all the fees from both sides on international transactions, but that's out of scope since I don't use this system for international purchases.) Now try to get a complete picture of the fees you pay when using Interac. Interac itself is refreshingly open about its fee structure, but getting the fee structure out of a bank without first opening an appropriate account and being a customer is an adventure and a half.

What?! A techbrodude firm that doesn't care about things like "privacy" or "consent" or any other such things that get in the way of being rapacious plunderers?!

SAY IT AIN'T SO!

So you have to keep more money on premises until it's worth depositing, thus increasing your exposure should you get robbed. (And what planet are you on where only customers get robbed, not stores? I want to live there.)

Handling cash has costs and risks both. A decent online payment system (by which I mean not credit cards since those are ludicrously expensive!) cuts back on both.

That parallel to tobacco is one of the reasons I gave up on most scented products. (The final reason is that most scented products cause huge skin dryness and itching issues for me it turns out.)

That parallel to tobacco is also why I hate advertising. Which is ironic considering I work in marketing.

A lot of "regular soap" still has additives.

As a final experiment try something like traditional Aleppo soap whose ingredients are typically:

1. olive oil;
2. laurel oil;
3. water;
4. lye (typically extracted from plant ashes); and
5. nothing else.

This is then aged for years (I use 3-year aged, but you can find stuff that's aged 10 years or more) which makes it even more mellow. The final result is a soap that is as gentle as it is possible to have an actual soap.

If that still gives you rashes, then yes, give up on soap forever because you can't get anything less reactive. If not, however, I find that it's one of the finest personal cleaning products I've ever used. (I use it for washing my hair, even, because the gentlest and most expensive of shampoos still cause that itchy, tiny-flake dandruff problem for me. Something about lauryl sulfates just don't get along with my skin.)

In almost any other generation I would have been practically forced into a loveless marriage, kept as an essential prisoner at home only as a cleaner, a sex toy, and a raiser of my husband's children.

Yeah, I was born in the right generation, if only just barely. (The social pressure to procreate was still very high.)

How do you plan to enforce "cash should be accepted everywhere"? Are you going to pay the extra costs that handling cash brings to small businesses? Are you going to subsidize the massive fees that come paired with business accounts? (Hint: yes. It's called "prices".) Are you going to reimburse people who get robbed because physical cash is easy to steal and difficult to trace once stolen?

Every time I hear "should" I get genuinely curious about specifics that rarely, if ever, get supplied.

This is reminding me of back in ... I want to say the '90s? ... when American businesses first seriously started claiming that public health care was an unfair subsidy and started asking for tariffs.

American businesses genuinely think they have a right to sell to anybody without changing their business practices in the slightest; no adaptation to local circumstances or cultural norms or laws.