Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note • Hacker News Board

Re: Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note

#151

Post by benj111 » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 9:18 PM UTC

spenczar5 wrote: post #119

sneak wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something can be in widespread use and not hit the 51% threshold required by “most consumers”.

Claim 1: there will be no paper money at all. Counter: obsolete things last longer than you think. Riposte: obsolete things are not used by most people. Counter-riposte: still used by many people. Counter-counter-riposte: technically, many != most. Somewhere, I think the original point was lost. This has been HN comment theater, the greatest arena of technical-yet-irrelevant correctness you can find.

Technically, I think you'll find that the new £50 notes won't be made out of paper at all.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymer_banknote

Re: Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note

#152

Post by jen729w » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 9:21 PM UTC

astura wrote: post #144

sneak wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most consumers don’t use any of those things any longer.

Vinyl is niche but pretty much everyone I know uses paper books/newspapers/magazines and occasionally radio. I'm listening to radio right now.

We bought an old FM radio - a beautiful NAD [0] from the 80s for $40, as it happens - because we like having music on in the background and the iPad/wireless combo just isn’t anywhere near as good as “the wireless”.

You know what the NAD has never done? Just stopped playing for no reason. Stopped playing because someone called. Stopped playing because a video played on a website. Stopped playing because the battery ran out. Stopped playing because my wifi did whatever. And so on, so forth.

We listen to vinyl for the same reason.

[0]: http://www.fmtunerinfo.com/NAD4300.jpg

Re: Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note

#153

Post by Retric » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 9:22 PM UTC

mLuby wrote: post #82

Retric wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s poetic, but oddly terrible advice as we can actually build ships. Longer lifespans is already a goal, but aging is unlikely to be “solved” in in the next 100 or even 1,000 years. People took much longer than that to figure out how to fly and we have been trying to solve aging for as long if not longer. Consider buildings age as do diamonds. To fix aging we need to get bodies to do things like regrow teeth and…

All attempts to cure aging have been magic/religion-based until very recently. Also it's not like we "learned to fly" as if cavemen could have done it had they only known the right wing shape and arm technique. It was only possible because of an accumulation of industrial and scientific knowledge. Significant life extension will likely be built off the same accumulation of knowledge, not some rainforest frog extract…

“Chinese experimented with small hot air balloons for signaling from as early as the 3rd century BCE.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_air_balloon

Yet, for the first person to ride a hot air balloon took ~2000 years in 1783. Some of this came down to advances in material science, but far less than you might think.

Re: Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note

#154

Post by fattypouch » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 9:22 PM UTC

isabouttime

Re: Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note

#155

Post by gerdesj » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 9:24 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #118

iamnotacrook wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just got back from a trip to the States and I have to say that US money is very boring by comparison to UK money. How on earth do blind/old people deal with the fact that all denominations are practically the same size, design, colour etc?

Try Dutch money from before the Euro: https://www.google.com/search?q=oxenaar+geld&client=ubuntu&h... :

I remember "discovering" the guilder notes back in the '70s. Brit in Germany. Our Sterling and the German DMs were so boring looking in comparison.

Re: Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note

#156

Post by dghf » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 9:25 PM UTC

soneca wrote: post #103

iamnotacrook wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just got back from a trip to the States and I have to say that US money is very boring by comparison to UK money. How on earth do blind/old people deal with the fact that all denominations are practically the same size, design, colour etc?

I recently moved to the US and I hate its coins. To the point that I consider all of them unusable. When I get home, I leave all the coins that I received as change on a plate by the door, hoping someday I will bring all of them at once somewhere to change for bills (I believe there are machines that do this). My complaints: i) They do not have numbers on them!! You have to read words to know the value ii) To make po…

> ii) To make point i) worse, they have nicknames printed on some of the coins!! They do not write "ten cents", it is "one dime". They do not write "twenty-five cents", they write "quarter dollar" (even the unit here changes)

Those aren't nicknames. They are the official names of the coins as laid down in the Coinage Act of 1792 (though "dime" was originally spelled "disme") and its successors.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_States_Statutes_at_Lar...

Re: Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note

#157

Post by imjasonmiller » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 9:27 PM UTC

doe88 wrote: post #83

Would be a good idea on many levels to follow suit and have Turing on an € bank note. His impact is universal.

I understand why you would say that, but that would be quite a big ask. There are only six bills, of which the design applies to 19 countries, and of which the United Kingdom is not a member. The bills feature fictitious imagery (at the time at least, as Tom Scott shows [1]) in order to avoid national bias.

For those curious as to what could have been, many of the 44 design proposals from 1996 [2] did feature historical figures.

1. https://youtu.be/S9E1wsxOSzM

2. http://www.coinsworld.eu/info/euro-banknotes-designs/

Re: Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note

#158

Post by michaelmrose » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 9:27 PM UTC

headmelted wrote: post #115

michaelmrose wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can someone who someone never chose to create have a right to exist?

I don't see what one has to do with the other. It's the year 2400 and recent developments in technology mean that a person (let's say John) can choose to live for 500 years, in favour of a chain of offspring. John makes this choice. John's father Harry would have made that choice had the technology been available, and would have enjoyed a longer life in favour of fathering John. The only reason John exists is because…

This is a remarkable chain of bad logic. We start with a real Harry a real person with real rights at point A and then proceed to discuss 2 different hypothetical points B and C where Harry did or didn't have a kid.

To discuss Johns hypothetical rights when he came into existence at point B makes sense. At point C he never did so its meaningless to discuss his rights. At A its possible to discuss B in context of B but impossible to be indebted NOW to entities in contexts in which they don't exist.

The breakdown is where we reason from B to A and assign every hypothetical being that could have possibly arisen the privileges of an actual existing person in A. B's possibilities are only reasonable in context of B.

To imagine otherwise we are stuck with accepting the murder of a googol potential slightly different children that could have resulted rather than the relatively few we had. Only slightly less absurd we could be morally obliged to have as many children as possible even if the result is that they are on net less successful and more miserable to avoid the greater loss of existence.

Reason it out yourself and consider the plethora of absurdities.

Re: Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note

#159

Post by flixic » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 9:27 PM UTC

tim333 wrote: post #47

johnchristopher wrote: post #6

These announcements always make me ponder about the people we'll put on bank notes or erect statues in honour of in 50 years and are alive and persecuted today but not recognized by society.

Satoshi Nakamoto? I think Turing was recognised as a great mathematician in his day but still persecuted.

It's not straightforward to put a face of an anonymous entity on a banknote.

Re: Alan Turing to be the face of new £50 note

#160

Post by whatshisface » Sun, Sep 01, 2019, 9:28 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #66

toomuchtodo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May they live as long as they wish a happy and healthy life, and may they die when they are ready and have made the choice themselves.

What will happen is that you will have a bunch of very rich centenarians who will own just about everything simply for having a couple of decades head start on the newcomers. The same thing is already happening today. Unless you want to cap wealth and property this is not going to end well. It's already at the point today where real estate and other relatively scarce resources are much more available to and owned by…

If we're imagining a world with immortality why not imagine one with space colonies, or some other form of growth? The new people could get the new stuff, same as it's been since the end of feudalism.