11/28: New Euro money
 

http://cellar.org/pictures/europaper.jpg

The rest of the world makes better money than the US. This is the new Euro currency, and once again it's colorful and bright and not at all like the boring-looking greenback.

http://cellar.org/pictures/eurocoins.jpg

But there's a problem with the coinage. A study found that two of the coins above have too much nickel in them. So much that five minutes of contact with these coins could produce "hand eczema", producing inflammation and itching, for those people allergic to the metal.

Even the US "nickel" coin isn't prone to cause such things.

The new money comes out in January.

fun moola
 

I had hoped that when they changed the US currency they would adopt different colors for the different denominations.

It would make a lot of sense in that you wouldn't have to read the number on the bill anymore, you'd soon know that a "green" was a five, a "blue" was a ten etc. Fumbling through your wallet would be faster, mistakes would be fewer.

I think the reason they stuck with all denominations being green was to keep the sense of stability associated with US currency, that people would get frightened if the money changed color. This I think was primarily to soothe old people, the young generation would quickly adapt.

Fourteen pence = 1 shilling
20 shillings = 1 pound
21 shillings = 1 guinea

I really will miss the silly, giddy mix of currencies. Certainly there is a point to rationalizing European currency, but it is another death of character. The Dutch currency is incomparably beautiful. The French, well, there is humor in that - like the AdeStE python that swallowed the elephant. The Spanish, ugly and flimsy.

The Euro notes are practically an invitation for committee-think.

how about our lame new ten dollar bill

http://www.canoe.ca/Feb5/billbig.jpg

its like a cheap knock off of european money

i liked the old ones better

2 questions
 

1: What is a euro "cent" called? (e0.01)

2: Why is there a coin worth two of them (e0.02)? It seems that when you made a new monetary system, you'd take to opportunity to shed archaic denominations. Is there a good reason anyone knows why the e0.01 and e0.05 couldn't suffice?

I dunno. But in Canada, they've got "Twonies" (as opposed to "loonies", which are worth $1 CAD) that are worth $2 CAD and they're pretty handy.

I recall being in Canada right when they came out, and I also recall trying to punch out the little gold-ish piece in the middle, to no avail.

Re: 11/28: New Euro money
 

Something like 13 robberies of the new currency have already been reported. The BBC listed it by countries which I currently don't have. However, it is estimated that 10% of the stolen cash is already in circulation.

The idea was to only show the money in low resolution pictures such as TV. However counterfeiters are believed to already have created phoney bills - before the people can even tell what is and is not real money.

yah, the lowest denomination of bill we have is a fiver.

toonies, heh... yes many people tried all kinds of things such as putting them in the freezer and smacking them with a hammer just to get them to break so they could have a refund... i knew a guy that spend a couple hundred and bought them up because he heard there was going to be a 'recall' due to this very fact...

Nice looking, true. Is it still worthless?

~Mike

Re: 11/28: New Euro money
 

I think the US nickel has zero nickel nowadays. The Canadian nickel has more.

I like US money. It looks like, well, money. European money looks like monopoly money. Australian money (with the plastic bits) is just weird.

And I like the $1 bill too. I hate carrying coins. It's not like they're worth intrinsicly more, and they're heavier. Since the Sacajawea dollar doesn't seem to be catching on, it seems likely we'll be keeping the $1 for a while, too.

Is the US 2$ bill still being circulated? I havent seen one in a while. I used to live near a cafe that regularly pumped these out into the community as change. It made me smile- like getting an amusing fortune cookie fortune.

sacks-a-coins
 

That Sacajawea thing was kind of weird.

They spent literally years coming up with just the right alloy, shape, design etc. for this new coin. It was even gold colored, the *coolest* color for a coin, IMO, even if it doesn't actually contain any gold.

The coins are finished, and then what?

Did they ever come out? I think I saw one of them in the wild, ever.

I haven't seen a circulating Sacawagea in quite a while. One showed up just as I was finishing the facing on my fireplace though so I stuck her in the mortar up in the corner. Hopefully, my girls will be sparked by her strength...

The last series date I saw on one was 1995, but I believe they're still circulated. IIRC (from working at a bank until 2 years ago), a bank can order them from their Federal Reserve branch.

the SQUAW-buck
 

I get them from post office vending machines. It would be great if they would take hold. We might be able to move the decimal place over and do away with pennies AND nickels.

Re: the SQUAW-buck
 

I don't know how the other 280 million Americans feel, but...

--I hate carrying change around. I hate carrying money around period. That's why I love the Visa debit card. The Susie flopped. I don't see the Squawbuck winning too many fans either. It IS cool though.

--Isn't there some lawmaker that wants to get rid of the penny? I'm all for it. Abe's already on the 5-spot. France got rid of the equivalent of their one cent piece a while ago...of course, they have the Euro coming soon though.

--The nickel is the most disrespected piece of currency we have. But it is useless as all hell.

Originaly posted by sycamore:     It's not completely uselsess, back in high school a bunch of us graduated from penny flicking. We moved up to the much heavier nickel? Ever been hit by a flying nickel. It hurts.... So you see it's not completely useless.

When I was in high school I got a job at a bank rolling coins in the vault.

They had this big machine just for rolling coins. I'd come in to work and there'd be piles and piles of bags of loose coin, each bag weighing about 10 pounds. I think one bag of quarters was $500, and a bag of pennies was $50. That's all I did -- dump bags of coins into this machine and take the resulting rolled coins and put them in boxes.

Anyway, while there I developed an intense hatred for dimes. Dimes were so thin that they would get stuck in every imaginable crevasse of this machine. There was not a minute opening anywhere in this machine that a dime could not find its way into at least every half-hour, and make the whole contraption come to a screeching halt. They weren't that easy to pry out, either.

Everyone at the bank would go into rants every so often about how stupid dimes were. "Dimes are the enemy".


heheh. ahh, memories.

golden dollar coins
 

These are definitely in circulation. The Navy uses them in their vending machines.

I can get you some if you want.

Brian

I'm converting.

Tuesday, January 1, 2002
1 Canadian Dollar = 0.70507 Euro
1 Euro (EUR) = 1.41829 Canadian Dollar (CAD)

Median price = 0.70419 / 0.70507 (bid/ask)
Estimated price based on daily US dollar rates.

You may recall the controversy when the new Canadian $10 bill (pictured in an earlier post above) was issued with the verse of "In Flanders Fields" as follows:

"In Flanders Fields the poppies blow ..."

Well, that's the Flanders in Belgium, not in The Simpsons. Homer Simpson would be quick to point out that the verse should read "grow" not "blow" but that has been clarified by snopes.com:

http://www.snopes2.com/business/money/canada1.htm

So, we're all clear now ... in Flanders Fields the poppies blow ... and in Canada ... the dollar blows!

Why are U.S. "Greenbacks" green?

Here's an explanation by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the Treasury folks who print U.S. paper currency notes:

http://www.bep.treas.gov/document.cfm/18/108

Re: 2 questions
 

Soviet currency had a 2 Kopek piece.

You used it to make a phone call from a public pay phone.
Among other things, you could also get 2 packs of matches for it.

http://www.rustypennies.com/catalog/pix/ae839.jpg

http://i.cnn.net/cnn/interactive/wor...germany.ap.jpg

Fireworks light up the sky around the Euro monument in front of the European Central Bank headquarters in Frankfurt, Germany.

New Year's celebrations mark the end of the beginning for the Euro, and the beginning of the end for the Deutsche Mark.

They removed 1 and 2 c peice here, smallest now is 5c. The milkbars had to sell lollies as bundles now instead of individual piece but the rest of the ountry yawned and rolled over.

I liek the idea of hte Euro, and it gives europe a simial financial powerblock to the US Greenback ,if it ever stop getting raped by US hedgefunds that is.


Don't like that idea of RFID tags in the high end notes though.

The populations of 12 countries acting together in one big Euronation....

Jag, I really enjoy the turn of some of your phrases. quite lyrical at times...

Hmm.. I wasn't going to say anything before, but since you've brought it up.   :)   What in the world is a milkbar, and what is a lollie?

Milkbars = Convenience Stores
Lollies = Suckers

I think.

But not in all the countries of the European common market, I'm sure.

Hmmm. Made me think of moloko bars from "A Clockwork Orange", but then that's a whole 'nother smoke. :-)

Is there a lollie born every minute?

milkbars = milk bars?
 

Didn't they have milk bars in "A Clockwork Orange"? Where they actually drank milk at a bar?

The image I remember was edgy and industrial, places where punks would go to get...milk, for whatever reason.

OK it was the deep future and everything was f*cked up accordingly, ala "Brazil" or "Airplane".

Anchorage man cashes in $7,920 worth of pennies

An Anchorage man yesterday [August 3, 2001] finished cashing in more than 792-thousand pennies. With help from a coin-processing company, 57 year old Sylvester Neal processed 288-thousand-141 pennies at a coin-counting machine in a local supermarket. Representatives of CoinStar hired an armored car to help Neal transport his heavy load. It took him until seven-45 in the evening to finish his task.

CoinStar says it's the most pennies ever processed by its machines by one person, more than doubling a record set in January by someone in Baltimore.

Neal decided to cash in most of his collection after making plans to move from Anchorage to Auburn, Washington. He previously had cashed in five-thousand dollars worth of pennies. He says the five-ton collection was too expensive to move. Neal is a retired state fire marshal. He's keeping about 200-thousand pre-1974 pennies.

Dude that's seriously messed up. What other Australian slang is there?

suckers?
what da?

jag.

lollipops.

those little balls of hard candy at the end of a rolled-up paper stick, most often white. they come in all sorts of colors and flavors. lollipops.

WORD. :)

oh man that's funny. :]

yea i know what they are
i've just never heard them called suckers by anyone australian before.

Nic Name, you posted that article about CoinStar and that man w/all the coins.

I recently heard an interesting fact on NPR the other day. The US mint had to lay off 357 employees as a result of CoinStar machines.

Reason being, the change is meant to be lost, thrown away, saved in jars stashed in the seat cushions never to be seen again, etc. We (U.S.) were producing X amount of coins every year to compensate for the coins that went out of circulation.

The CoinStar machines have changed that, though. People actually 'hoard' change now just to toss it into a jar to take to CoinStar eventually.

"This year alone we’ll put through 1.3 or 1.4 billion dollars back into the economy."--Dianne Renihan is the CFO.

That's a LOT of coinage going back into circulation and a LOT of jobs being lost because of it.

I found the whole story quite interesting.

edit: screw it, link's gone...go to google like Nic said. :)

Hey stunt ... try another edit and erase the bad link.

the story can be seen in every paper by searching google using search terms coinstar mint layoffs, so a direct link to support your story is not absolutely necessary here. :)

OK lemme see if I got this straight:
 

So our government pays itself to make money?

That's it, I'm opening a new country right now.

Can't drop a dime anymore
 

Hear this one yesterday

In Europe you can't loose a penny anymore, now you Euronate

Pissing away a fortune in the common market will be euronation.

http://www.oldwivestales.net/oldwive...ec032i_thm.jpg

It's an old wives tale that if you have itchy palms you're coming into money ...
or is it you're gonna hafta pay out some money ... or are you just allergic to the euro?