For some reason the mention of a "Susan B Anthony" dollar stuck in my brain as an "Alice B Sheldon" dollar. Susan Anthony is a person who I've never heard of. I'm almost tempted not to find out who she is or was to preserve a nugget of delicious cognitive dissonance. A world in which governments put Alice Sheldon on the currency would be an interestingly different world from the one we seem to be inhabiting.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On 10 Apr 2002 at 13:43, Sunder wrote: > > I've had several dozen of these (stamp and other vending machines provided > > them as change here in NYC), and kept only one. > You're not supposed to keep currency, you're supposed to spend it. > I generally prefer the bills to coins, because the coins make an > annoying jjingle jangle and also wear out my pockets. > >They're horrible. Sure, > > they look like gold when you get them but they oxidize quickly when > > handled and look worse than old pennies. > > Serves the mint right for trying to pass what clearly is a slap in the > > face of anyone who remembers that the US currency was at one time > > tethered to actual gold. > Now that everyone knows that even coins are only of symbolic > value, I don't see why they don't make them out of plastic. Because symbols work better when they bear certain kinds of resemblance to what they are symbolising? Human brains are hard-wired that way. Plastic money doesn't twang the right neural circuits. Who would care for non-alcoholic communion wine? [...] Anyway, no-one has yet come up with a convincing reason for me to want to carry any kind of electronic wallet for small transactions. Anything under, say, 50 dollars American, is more easily done in physical cash money. If nothing else the irritation that you'd go through when you lose one and have to get another makes it not worth it. If I lose coins I lose the value of the coin and nothing else. If I lose a bank card it ruins my day. Even if the card was only good for 50 quid I still have to jump through hoops to get a new one. Obviously smart cash might make sense as public transport tickets, or as a prepaid hotel bill (to hotel owners at any rate), and smart-card applications for these things have been developing for decades. (We certainly were issued with something like them at the hotel for the 1989 Eastercon in UK - which I only remember because it was the last I went to for some years, they might have been around much earlier) But in general street use - why bother? Even if these putative electronic wallets were as easy to get hold of as cash (walk up to a machine any time of day or night, stick in some id, type in PIN, walk off) you might as well just use cash. I suppose they could be of benefit to the operators of ATMs. The one at the all-night filling station round the corner from me seems to be have someone using it every ten minutes or so in the late evening. So, at a wild guess, the stock level might be between 5 and 10 thousand pounds. That's getting towards where it might pay someone to use heavy machinery to get it out of the wall. Even if it splurts itself with ink (there are a lot of stupid criminals out there) that is still very inconvenient for the building owners. But there's nothing in it for the user. An initially valueless smart wallet might be less attractive to muggers, but they just have to wait for you to activate it. Or point a knife at you till you do. And the more faffing about you need to do (PIN, setting authorisation limits, pointing the thing at the reader) the more old-fashioned cash would seem simpler. Now, using a mobile phone as money might sell. People seem determined to use them for everything else. If there was a way of transferring prepay directly between SIMs it would be used by teenagers (and drug dealers) to settle small debts. Maybe they already are and I haven't noticed. Ken Brown And her smoke goes up for ever: http://www.mtsu.edu/~dlavery/Tiptree/clute.htm
