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Canada Rolls Out Plastic Money
markian writes "Canada is set to switch to new banknotes that last 2.5 times longer than paper money. High-tech features include metallic imagery in a transparent area, raised ink, transparent text, and hidden numbers. 'If you look through the frosted maple leaf emblem at a single-point light source and hold it close to your eye, you'll see a hidden circle of numbers that match the face value of the note.' The Bank of Canada has more information on the subject. Now if we can just get rid of the penny..."
Australia has had polymer banknotes since 1988, and in fact it's an Australian company that will be supplying these notes to Canada. Polymer banknotes have been used to varying degrees in 27 countries prior to Canada.
Came to Australia in 1998 and thought the polymer notes looked like Monopoly money. Having used it for a while it's so much better than the paper stuff. Hardly ever tears, is easy to see how much you have in your wallet just by opening it. Stands out from a wad of receipts.
Whenever I have to go the US I hate having to use those crappy bits of toilet paper that feel like they been stuck to some homeless guy's arse since 1973.
You call me a pedant? I prefer the term "correct"
man I feel the pain. Costs like 1.6 cents [as of 2009 and according wikipedia 1.79 cents per penny last year] just to make one penny and they SUCK. 99% of the time I just tell whatever cashier/staff keep the pennies. Keeps em out of my pocket/change jar and might help the next bloke who is a penny short :)
Canada dumped the dollar bill in favor of coins of the same denomination. We talk about it in the US - just like we said back in the 60s that we would switch to the metric system - and never actually do it.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Some highlights:
Just For Fun (John K Addis)
http://richardsmith.posterous.com/just-for-fun-john-k-addis-dollar-redeign
Moving Forward, Looking Back (Sean Flanagan)
http://richardsmith.posterous.com/moving-forward-looking-back-sean-flanagan-dol
Michael Tyznik
http://richardsmith.posterous.com/dollar-redeign-michael-tyznik
Michelle Haft
http://richardsmith.posterous.com/dollar-redeign-michelle-haft
Richard Smith
http://richardsmith.posterous.com/?tag=banknoteredesign
James Harless
http://richardsmith.posterous.com/james-harless-dollar-redeign
Sometimes You Can't See the Spots for the Trees (Patrick Timmes)
http://thinkcreatebelieve.blogspot.com/2009/06/patrick-timmes-dollar-redeign-sometimes.html
Call me paranoid but government fiat seems a little untrustworthy to me.
Actually, Fiat aren't state-owned, and I have the impression they've improved reliability a lot since the "Fix It Again, Tony" days.
Doubtful. A lot of prices end in .99 not because that's the store's actual cost, but because apparently many customers think 4.99 is $4, not $5.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_pricing
Australia got rid of the 1c coin years ago. Prices that used to end in .99 now end in .95, not .00.
My last wallet went through the wash and dryer a number of times
The (au) notes certainly held up significantly better than everything else in the wallet (bloody drivers license and library card)
Ducks with prosthetics may also use plastic bills.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If your dryer gets over 130C, you've got bigger problems than melted money.
Canada’s new notes are being printed on Guardian®, a biaxial-oriented polypropylene substrate manufactured by Securency International of Australia.
refs: banknote design
Polypropylene properties
I think they go through a regular dryer just fine. I seem to recall putting some through mine without a problem. At higher temperatures they shrink like those cereal-box novelties. I have a friend with a miniature $5 note that was in the pocket when he ironed his shirt.
The most annoying tendency is for the notes not to lie flat. The first generation of $5 notes were particularly bad. I was working in retail just after they were introduced and it was a real chore to keep them from curling up in the till and escaping from under the spring clip thingy. The technology has improved a lot, but they're still a bit curly.
As to the commenter below asking about the g-string issue, if you roll them length-wise they'll stay straight, but the corners and edges can be quite sharp and scratchy, so the ladies (and, one presumes, gentlemen in the appropriate establishments) probably prefer their tips on the stage, not in the undies.
Be careful. People in masks cannot be trusted.
The problem with consolidation is there isn't verification. So someone could swipe an invalid card and you wouldn't not it until you did the consolidation.
We had similar problem here in Oregon. The parking machines would bundle all the transaction and send them off at midnight. People knew about it and would use blanks or expired cards.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
No. At least not necessarily so.
If they do it in the same way as e.g. the (pre-Euro) Netherlands, the prices don't change at all. It's only rounded when you pay, and it's the total purchase amount that gets rounded up or down, not each item. So if you buy one carton of milk, it's $0.98, and you have to pay $1.00 -- thus they get 2 cents. But if you buy two, it's 1.96, and you pay $1.95 -- and you get a penny. So the most you can win or lose is two cents per store you visit, and even with clever pricing on the store's part, it often works in your favor anyway.
Anyway, it's only on cash transactions, as debit and credit transactions are still always done to the penny. How many of those do you actually make in a day?
No. Well...maybe. Actually, yes. It really just depends.
Swedish rounding is a reasonable solution for this. It is applied to the total cost of a single order and only applied to cash sales. Rounding up might still happen more often on average due to people buying single items but a (literally) penny pinching customer could also "game" the system by paying cash in the round down instances and by credit/debit card when the amount would otherwise be rounded up.
Dropping 1 and 2c coins went down fairly well her in Australia from what I recall.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
They all prefer their tips on the stage.
Tough titty for them.
I'll continue to ice down a bunch of coins then drop them into her g-string while pretending to slip a dollar bill in. They love that.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Prices in Australia still do end in .99, it's only the final total at the cash register that is rounded down to the nearest 5c.
Can I assume that your employer pays you in chickens and grain?
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Australia got rid of the 1c coin years ago. Prices that used to end in .99 now end in .95, not .00.
Actually its a little bit more complex than that in Australia. Prices that are not a multiple of the smallest coin are still allowed (ie any interger value for cents is OK). At the checkout the final_total_only is rounded (down to the nearest multiple of 5 cents for sales ending in 1c, 2c, 6c, 7c & up to the nearest multiple of 5 cents for sales ending in 3c, 4c, 8c, 9c; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_rounding, but only if cash is used for purchase. Electronic payments are charged at the exact total cost. IOW, very little difference to cost of most transactions, but fewer coins required (along with savings for pocket wear and coin production costs).
At least our money doesn't look like it was made by Parker Bros. :)
If you can't convince them, convict them.
No, but unfortunately the value is about the same.
In New Zealand we got rid of the 5c coin in 2006. A lot of prices still end in .95 and .99 of course. If you pay by cash these are rounded down to .90c or in some cases up by swedish rounding http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_rounding varying between retailers of course.
This means you inevitably pay slightly more or slightly less for a electronic transaction than paying by cash.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Oswald Avery (born in Halifax, NS) was the senior member of the Rockerfeller team that experimentally verified that genetic information was encoded in DNA rather than as previously thought in cell protein. The Avery-MacLeon-McCarty experiment set the stage for Crick and Watson's discovery the helical structure of DNA.
It is amazing how much it costs to deal with cash and how much more it cost to deal with coins. Australia has one and two dollar coins which are heavy, bulky coins. There are rumours that many banks keep a large part of "cash reserve" as coins in containers since they can't afford to ship them around and its cheaper to order new coins at the government's expense. A common sight in banks around closing time is the people who run restaurants going to collect brick sized packets of coins for change. The major stores like K-mart have two armoured car deliveries, one for the coins and one for the notes. Now you have to fee parking meters with $2 coins and its not uncommon to see $16/hr meters (run by the same group who is trying it in Chicago but with quarters). I can't see how the $1 and $2 coins are beneficial to anyone once you figure in the transport cost of the longer lasting coin. The average age of the notes I currently have is older than the average age of the coins and many of the $2 coins are so beat up they won't work in vending machine.
There's not a lot of polymers that behave that way until they get a lot colder than that and this stuff is not neoprene (which does get brittle at that temperature). Even normal cling wrap has a low enough glass transition temperature that soaking it in liquid nitrogen is not enough to make it brittle.
Yeah, it really sucks to be able to tell the difference between denominations with a quick glance or by touch.
I do note your smiley, but plenty of USians are serious when they object to different colored notes. I live in Chile, where they are rolling out new notes for all denominations--in plastic. I think they're great. They look cool and seem really durable. The different colors make it super easy to tell what value it is. One way in which that's useful is when people throw money into the pot to pay for a group dinner--guests sometimes don't get the exchange rate and will accidentally substitute a $1000 bill for a $10000. The former is green and the latter is blue. Easy.
I also think it really says something about priorities when you still have the same people on the bills all the time. Why not have American scientists? That would be awesome.
Aussie money is extremely tear resistent, but once a small tear does occur then they tear in half very easily. Thankfully in 24 years of the system I have only ever had maybe half a dozen notes tear, I have had far more US money destroyed yet I only visit there a few weeks each year.
I can pop in a loonie much quicker then swiping my card, sometimes reswiping, and entering my pin. Plus as an added benefit, no worries about a crooked machine stealing my card + pin and emptying my bank account and as a bonus, no one knows what I spend my money on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The US uses coloured bills now. Sure, they're not coloured enough to be useful, but you have to ease Americans into things gradually.
"What will happen if a baby sucks on a polymer note?"
It won't get high from the cocaine embedded in the fibres?