You don’t expect a European migrant to, say, the jungles of New Guinea or Borneo to take up headhunting on arrival, so why the hell do we expect a Central American peasant, whose sole experience of functioning in a modern state consists of fleeing heavily armed fellow peasants hired by the various ricos in his home country, to be able to immediately participate effectively in an American context upon their crossing the border here?

You want to validate an idea, you need to show it works both ways, and these geniuses who keep assuming that by adopting the outward forms of a culture, like Danish socialism, you’ll somehow carry over all the underlying things that make that social system work in Denmark. It’s the same ‘effing idiocy that they put into policy in the last housing bubble–”Oh, successful middle-class families all own their own houses; we’ll help these poor people, who have none of the characteristics which made these middle-class families successful, buy houses… And, then they’ll automatically be successful middle-class members!!”. Yeah. Sure. That’s how it works, all right.

Cue video of the effects of such thinking in Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and soon to be seen in South Africa…

I’ve concluded that the primary problem with the people running Western civilization (into the ground, I might add…) is that they have a fundamental inability to work out the intricacies of cause and effect, attributing things appearing on the surface to surface causes, while ignoring the deeper waters they actually stem from. It’s like someone looking at an electric light, and paying attention only to the light and the switch, while ignoring the electrical wiring and power plant as being irrelevant to lighting the room…

I may have misread it myself, but I read it as:

1. She doesn’t bother to convert or carry a lot of cash, depending on regular payment via phone/debit or regular withdrawals, again using the phone.

2. She still had the credit cards but assumed they needed near-immediate cancellation because the loss of the phone would compromise them [purchase records or anything else in the phone's data].

#1 is a sign of the times. In the past you’d have been able to set something up in person at a local bank to connect to your own. No idea if that is easier now or harder than 20 years ago, and at that my experience is Britain, not Denmark. Or you’d have some more Danish and/or US cash in the hotel safe, or AMEX travellers’ cheques. [Wow. Flashback. Don't leave home without them.]

#2 I have no idea of best practices. How fast does a stolen cellphone get stripped of data and that sold off to credit card hacker types?

Curiously, this anecdote suggests loss of phone abroad is a more immediately and seriously damaging scenario than using your wallet used to be. Far more content to lose.

Typing “Megan McArdle” into a search engine returns a reporter from New York, formerly working for Bloomberg. Looks like she has spent a lot of time in high-crime cities.

If it was her purse that got stolen, I would still have a hard time with this story; anyone with her background, particularly an experienced traveler, would know better than to keep everything in one easily-stolen package.