A larger image, for people who want to see the detail: https://i.imgur.com/qmTZc9C.jpg
I feel like they really could have found a better photo... or at least touched that one up to remove the graininess, blur, and rough edges...
New Alan Turing £50 note design is revealed
61–70 of 171 posts
Re: New Alan Turing £50 note design is revealed
#62Polymer bank notes are considered better for the environment because of durability and under the guise of recycling, but now that we know about the catastrophe of microplastics, are they really? The volume is massive: with the most used notes lasting 3-5 years it won't be long until you have a billion plastic notes in circulation.
I think you'll find those £50 notes will last decades or more in someones safe...
Re: New Alan Turing £50 note design is revealed
#63Polymer bank notes are considered better for the environment because of durability and under the guise of recycling, but now that we know about the catastrophe of microplastics, are they really? The volume is massive: with the most used notes lasting 3-5 years it won't be long until you have a billion plastic notes in circulation.
Textiles (through washing) and Tyres (abrasion on the road) are by far the biggest sources of microplastics. https://www.eib.org/en/essays/plastic-pollution Introduction of these notes will probably not even be visible in microplastics assays.
Textiles seem like quite an easy fix - simply require HEPA style liquids filters on every washing machine before water is sent down the drain.
The filter could be big and designed to last the life of the machine. It's far better to dispose of a single chunk of solid plastic waste than the billions of particulates that would have gone into waterways...
Re: New Alan Turing £50 note design is revealed
#64Cool design + polymer, but they should probably just abolish the £50 already. Very few places accept them. Never mind the £100 notes you can get in some parts of the UK. I would say they should encourage better acceptance of these denominations, but cash seems to be dying in general. I look to Switzerland with envy, where as far as I can tell you can stroll into the supermarket and drop a 1000-franc note without issu…
>Very few places accept them
I have heard this since I was a kid, in reality, it isn't true, at least not in London. I have never been refused when presenting a £50, not that I have carried them more than a dozen times. Most places that have issues taking them are small merchants who give away too many notes breaking them, so will often ask for a smaller note. When I was in New York once, I went into a CVS and bought $60 of sweets to bring home, the cashier shouted 'bill check' when i presented a $100 bill, so I guess I look more dodgey in the US.
Re: New Alan Turing £50 note design is revealed
#65I haven't used or seen a £50 note for more than 15 years. In a cashless society who is still using these?
I'm not in the UK, but surely you guys have some sort of equivalent to Gumtree/Facebook Marketplace, as well as semi-legitimate cash-only businesses and tradies that are trying to avoid tax?
Gumtree/Facebook Marketplace is still mostly cash in the UK - neither the buyer nor seller really trust the other with their bank details. Nobody is 100% sure that bank transfers are irreversible (they are, but if you complain loudly enough to the sellers bank they might mark the seller as a fraudster, ban them from banking for life, and transfer the money back to you).
Cash protects both buyers and sellers more from crazy people.
Re: New Alan Turing £50 note design is revealed
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
What was inaccurate about it for those that know little about Turing's life
About 10yrs of my academic career included studying much of Turing's work, I've read his biography by Hodges multiple times (one of the most incredible books ever written btw, covering in great detail everything you could want to know about Turing, his family, his life and his work), and worked closely with some of the best academics in the country on the subject of Turing. I'm not showing off, and I don't mean to sa…
> I couldn't have done a better job in giving them a good feel for the situation and the pressures, the ideas and personalities involved.
Sincerely, I do defer to you for your opinion of Turing's personality - but when I saw the film it was so very disappointing that Turing was written as a lone-genius type - while it didn't drive the plot, I understand it really wasn't what he was like as a person. Come to think about it, I can't think of any mainstream cinema production that portrayed a leading academic as a _normal person_ - they invariably fall into stock character tropes, and The Imitation Game was no exception. That's what disappointed me the most.
Additionally, like many other historical biographies, the film condenses multiple people - or in this case, entire teams of people into single characters. I can understand that for budgetary and storytelling reasons, but the film's decision to substitute Turing's circle of literally a handful of characters for what would have been hundreds of cryptographers and researchers (out of a Bletchley Park workforce of almost 10,000 people concurrently in early 1945!) was enough to break the film for me - and even if that fudging wouldn't have made me take issue with the film the scenes where Turing-and-Chums single-handedly make moral decisions about the handling of high-level intelligence certainly did. Those scenes added nothing of historical value and would have added emotional tension only to viewers entirely ignorant about how military intelligence gathering and analysis works - which, unfortunately, seems to include the film critics.
Re: New Alan Turing £50 note design is revealed
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. Two absurd hyperboles (what is the plural hyperbole?) in one sentence.
Unless the UK has undergone a revolution in the past 80 years, I'm afraid to say that it is still the same government. The people involved are different, but just like in a company, it doesn't matter if the C-suite changes over the years - its still the same organization. Like a corporation, that government definitely feels bound by the obligations made by its predecessors, and, likewise, feels entitled to receive an…
There are many valid criticisms of the present government including in human rights areas, but considering it to be morally culpable for the legally-sanctioned harassment of a gay man before most of its MPs were born (and before the actual PM backed his party's pro gay-marriage faction and its MPs passed a law to formally pardon people convicted of Turing's "offence") simply because it respects its predecessors' debts is absurd. And exactly the same standard is applied to corporations, which is why we don't consider German CEOs to be Nazi war criminals.
Governments are composed of people: people inherit money and associated debt but they don't inherit guilt.
Re: New Alan Turing £50 note design is revealed
#68> Old paper £50 notes will still be accepted in shops for some time. I find that amusing because I suspect that in practice not many shops accept them. It's hard for me to know because despite having lived in the UK for about half a century I've never had a £50 note. Perhaps they have a plan to bring the new £50 notes into use. If today's cash machines only have the hardware to dispense two kinds of note they could r…
I have carried £50 notes (and accepted £50 notes when I had jobs while studying) and the only occasions I've seen them refused is when there wasn't enough change in the cash register. Scottish and other non-English sterling is another matter. Despite being legal tender in England, smaller shops don't see it frequently enough to want to take the risk handling them.
Im like 80% sure Scottish notes are not Legal tender even in Scotland. Legal tender has a fairly narrow definition. They are accepted, and legal, but not 'legal tender'... Well that was my understanding at least. There is also no obligation for shops to accept _any_ notes as far as I know. Especially when they have no idea how to tell if they're legit (Scottish notes are incredibly rare in England and Wales).
Re: New Alan Turing £50 note design is revealed
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly they will become acceptable most places soon - inflation will take care of that. I remember bars refusing to take twenty's as the night wore on. Now you can barely get a round out of a twenty.
I don’t see this happening. I’m sure (as far as bars go) contactless payment will be preferred more in future. COVID has sped up the process of that. It’s unlikely to see many £50 notes around. There were already a lot of “card only” bars in London and that was pre-COVID. Also inflation is low and will be low for quite some time so that won’t be a factor.
Ever since I've blamed myself in Scotland in 2019 when I tried to pay for a group of friends and the restaurant had a random "no foreign credit cards" rule, cash is and always will be king when it comes to the UK for me.
In many countries, accepting cash is legally required. Unless a foreign national can pay with their credit card reliably, such a rule should be the required fallback payment method.
Re: New Alan Turing £50 note design is revealed
#70Cool design + polymer, but they should probably just abolish the £50 already. Very few places accept them. Never mind the £100 notes you can get in some parts of the UK. I would say they should encourage better acceptance of these denominations, but cash seems to be dying in general. I look to Switzerland with envy, where as far as I can tell you can stroll into the supermarket and drop a 1000-franc note without issu…
>Very few places accept them I have heard this since I was a kid, in reality, it isn't true, at least not in London. I have never been refused when presenting a £50, not that I have carried them more than a dozen times. Most places that have issues taking them are small merchants who give away too many notes breaking them, so will often ask for a smaller note. When I was in New York once, I went into a CVS and bought…
Well, I had the opposite experience here in the North East - when my dad came over to visit he had a bunch of £50 notes he got from the cash exchange office and we literally couldn't spend them. He wanted to buy some jewlery for my mum and the store wouldn't take his notes. Few other places around the town wouldn't either. We literally ended up going to the branch of my bank and changing them for £20 notes and suddenly it wasn't a problem anymore.
It's just dumb. UK government should definitely drive a larger adoption of the £50 notes, it's so bizzaire to me that the British population treats their own banknotes like something from the moon.