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Hungary's Needy Given Money to Burn
Knowing that ideas are a dime a dozen and eager to think outside the box, Hungary's central bank is burning old currency to help the needy. The bank has found that the 40-50 tons of currency that needs to be burned every year is a blessing in disguise for people caught between a rock and a hard place due to the extreme cold sweeping across Europe.
At the very least, if they take the truck, they shouldn't leave the load of waste money in the street.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Watched the video. Not sure how much energy it takes to process the currency into briquets, but it is certainly one of the most innovative "Recycling" programs I've seen, and from the looks of it, one that actually benefits all parties involved (Central Bank gets to destroy old currency, Poor get free fuel).
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
If it just got T-Boned, it might make a delicious meal
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Providing wood or coal would be an extra cost to the government. If they already have the paper and are already destroying it why not compress it into a useful brick for burning. I'd imagine it wouldn't burn that fast if compressed enough.
I can't help but think of how depressed I would be with the irony if I were in this situation. I'm so poor and don't have money, but the government was kind enough to bring some to me and let me watch it burn.
"Our examination showed that the heating properties of these shredded currency briquettes are similar to brown coal so they are pretty useful for heating and resolve the problem to find fuel."
Absolutely. this image immediately came to mind.
FWIW, this is apparently about destroying old worn out bills, a routine practice, as opposed to inflation gone wild
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Not really a great analogy.
Firstly, any government can build a mandate partially on dubious slogans. There's already plenty of people in the US who want compensation against the ills brought onto them by conspiring bankers, so a party that adopted that mandate would probably be radical, but at least get some votes.
Secondly, just because the fellas are burning money doesn't mean they are burning money like Germany. Any central bank destroys money each year when the money is too old to use. Bills deteriorate, become obsolete due to no security features etc. Hungary's inflation has been around 3-4% for several years so no need to fear hyperinflation just yet.
Sure if you ignore that they are the exact opposite situations.
One is burning currency because the government is printing so much that it's worthless.
the other is burning currency because the government doesn't want to increase the supply of currency (and hence make it worthless) as it produces new notes.
I'm surprised they don't print an expiration date on money, making sure people spend it fast before it's worth nothing.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
It's more cotton and denim than wood-pulp paper IIRC.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
At around 1:30 into the video you can see this in the background: http://i.imgur.com/J2SZ1.jpg
I can't imagine what else passes for autism therapy in former Soviet bloc countries.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
a blessing in disguise for people caught between a rock and a hard place
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
that's some device gymnast's use. you can see it in olympics. you hold those and do stuff.
Read radical news here
Have they ever thought about selling their unusable notes out for novelty purposes? I think it would spice up a good game of monopoly :)
.. is that one, inevitabl,e Godawful pun. Sigh.
For the rest I think it's not a bad idea at all.
Insert
...you received capitalism.
The minority who say that things are better under capitalism are as much exploitative liars as those who said things were perfect under the Soviets. But, for the average working man, things are much worse. And I say this as a Russian emigrant who left the USSR a few years after the drunk puppet Yeltsin was installed and the only significant increase for the average man was in the number of destitutes, drug addicts and suicides.
You want to see what an old Western democracy turns into under global capitalism? See Greece now or England in a few years' time. And they will take away more of your welfare state to pay for the debts created by a corporation-government, selling off what you built and own and giving you nowhere to turn to.
Provide a man with fire and he keeps warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm the rest of his life. Something.. something.. something.. soviet Russia.
Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. -HLM
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Let the motherf*cker burn!
It's more cotton and denim than wood-pulp paper IIRC.
Denim is cotton that is dyed in one direction with indigo.
So, all these comments (at least as of when I last reloaded the page) and noone asking how much to buy a couple bricks? I for one would love to buy a couple bricks to keep by my fireplace. If cheap enough, I'd even burn them sometimes, but if not, would be a fun conversation starter.
:)
C'mon, any Hunkies reading this? Post a reply if you can score me some!
PS: I'm an American of Hungarian decent, not insult intended calling you a Hunky & even if I wasn't, if you were offended, you should lighten up
TFA says that the money briquettes have a comparable energy to "brown coal" (aka Lignite), or about 2/3rds the energy of "normal" anthracite coal.
Heating a house in the US Northeast with anthracite takes between three and six tons per year.
So a mere 40-50 tons? Even keeping the house so cold you can see your breath, the amount of these briquettes they need to get rid of will, quite seriously, only heat 10-15 homes.
I truly applaud the vast improvement over burning their retired currency as mere waste, but this has zero impact on keeping a nation's poor from freezing to death in the winter.
I wonder if any notes survived the shredding and compacting process to be salvagable...
Far more likely they are replacing them with newly printed currency - currency does wear after all.
If they aren't then it's even more the opposite - they are activiely trying to create deflation and really punish those who have taken out loans.
Of course that ignores the not physical currency part of the money supply.
Have you seen the exchange rates?
They are not affected by QEs and that's an objective fact.
40-50 tons may sound like a lot, but I burn around 20 tons of wood to (mostly) heat my (admittedly large) house, with maybe 10 rooms. Supposing you could fit an entire family in something like a room, and the shredded bills really do have the heat content of brown coal (which is something like 2x wood per mass), and further supposing they are using a modern heating system (like an apartment block with a big gasification boiler) that's 2x more efficient than mine, that's still only like 100 households.
That's certainly a good thing, but hardly worth mentioning beyond the publicity value. You'd think that the bulk biomass market would be a more efficient way to merge the shredded bills into the supply stream. (A guess on my part.)
Funny, our Aussie dollar is worth more than the US dollar, and has been for a while. That reminds me, gotta start importing crap that's too expensive over here. In any case i get the feeling inflating you currency is moreso to put your country in a competitive position against others.
Well, Australia actually is a great example.
It has implemented aggressive fiscal stimulus (fueled by deficit spending) from the very start averting the severe recession. Total amount of stimulus measures was about $60 billions in 2 years which works out to about $3000 per individual, mostly in direct spending.
In comparison, US had implemented $787 billion stimulus which works out to about $2300 per individual. Unfortunately, more than a half of that amount was in tax cuts which are MUCH less effective than direct spending.
Besides, Australia has never had a deregulation boom like the US so the real estate bubble was not that severe.