
Magnanimity
> He was eventually granted a posthumous pardon in 2013
It's okay then if you're pardon me for having my life wrecked by you...
Two years on from its initial announcement, the Bank of England has unveiled the design of the Alan Turing £50 note. Due to hit circulation on 23 June, the design replaces the relatively short-lived incarnation featuring Matthew Boulton and James Watt. Instead, the update will show the scientist Alan Turing and the Automatic …
This. After I commit suicide because you're chemically castrating me because of who I love and what I do in private behind closed doors, it is very gracious of you to "pardon" me long, long, long after I'm dead and buried.
Remind me to mail you a Thank You card from my grave site.
The newer biographies (after Hodges' classic) list entries from his diary suggesting the suicide was more depression that he thought his work was going nowhere than his personal life.
But as long as the government put up a pride flag once a year they can completely ignore worrying about mental health services.
>It wouldn't surprise me if chemical castration and persecution caused depression and lack of motivation.
Yes, was just pointing out that when suicide is still a major cause of death for men of his age. The govt saying: well we aren't publicly beastly to gays anymore and we remember to put a rainbow flag on our twitter feed once a year so we have solved this!
A bit like dealing with PTSD in the military by pardoning long dead WWI shell-shock victims
Presumably the downvoters agree with the government slapping Turing's name on anything and everything now in the name of our new-found post-Brexit pound-shop flag-waving patriotism when it was the establishment that drove him to suicide in the first place as a thank you for his war effort.
I agree with this sentiment, but also feel it necessary to add that Gordon Brown's statement came across as a genuine expression of sorrow and was as much as he could have done given the time that had passed. Unfortunately, it is far too late for Turing, and too late to punish those who made his life hell because his personal life affected their strangled sensibilities.
> How do you show you're sorry for an injustice
It's a matter of word choice: "Pardon" assumes the victim is guilty of something.
If you want to say you're sorry, well, you admit the guilty party is you, not him. You don't magnanimously "pardon" a victim: "I did you wrong, but see, I'm the bigger man, I pardon you"
As a USAian, acquiring one is going to involve my daughter and her UK friend, an Apple or Venmo transfer, an order from Amazon.UK (for a nice Lucite display holder) and a good deal of postage for same. The note, I suspect can be mailed inside a greeting card.
Gotta have one, though. Turing is responsible for the principles behind the gadgets that have been my life's work. He deserves a place on my shelf, alongside Marconi (IT 100 lira note)
>As a USAian,... Turing is responsible for the principles behind the gadgets that have been my life's work. He deserves a place on my shelf, alongside Marconi (IT 100 lira note)
Do you think if the average American knew of Franklin's scientific work he would be removed from the $100 ?
"Lots of places dont accept anything bigger than a 20....."
I wonder if this will change - one reason I've heard shops give is that it robs them of change (which they pay for), but that isn't logical because it just means that the £20 note becomes the de-facto terminal denomination - a unit that is accepted but never handed out in change. Because of this, terminal denominations always accumulate, and they should never be in short supply to the retailer. Excluding an entirely avoidable edge-case (failing to start / reset with higher denominations), the actual value doesn't matter.
The other reason is risk. For obvious reasons, counterfeiters will always target the highest denomination they can produce a decent facsimile of. But all of the new polymer notes seem to be forgery-resilient (at least for now) - I've never been landed with even a fake £5 note (at least to my knowledge); previously I've been stung on several paper notes. And the £50 polymer seems to have gone to town on anti-forgery devices. I'd be surprised if it ever gets convincingly counterfeited.
Of course, inertia might be a problem - perhaps people are so primed to distrust or dislike £50 notes that they never will again, come what may.
Probably true. Many shops won't take them because of the risk of forgeries, and the shop carries the loss. Interesting though that the last time we got caught out was with a couple of fake Scottish £20s (old style). And I think we've had a fake new £10. I'm sure the ink isn't meant to wear off!
The decline in cash is very real - our community shop has seen cash decline from about 30% of turnover to around 10%, even though total turnover is still up compared to pre-covid. Even a coke and a packet of crisps is usually on card (or account). We've already pretty well stopped doing cashback as there's so little in the till.
And I think we've had a fake new £10. I'm sure the ink isn't meant to wear off!
We've seen a lot of fivers like that and had shops refuse them because 'fake'. The problem seems to be concentrated around any folds.
However, I was chatting to the local baker (yup, an actual baker) earlier this week in the context of his slightly dodgy card machine and whether I had enough change for Chelsea buns as well as pasties should the machine not work (and it is expensive for him - even in this very busy shop with three or four staff behind the counter to have two machines, so he has just the one) and he said he doesn't think it's neccessarily fake notes, he thinks that some alcohol-based hand sanitisers are causing the damage.
I can't afford to sacrifice a couple of notes of each denomination to test the theory so I'll leave that to someone else :-)
M.
Also available, lardy bread. Why don't you see proper, gooey, sugary lardy bread in Asda?
Good shop, shame he only runs (Google Maps) two outlets now - the third, which was mainly a tea room, has been a high profile casualty of the last year.
M.
We ran a pub pre Covid - card (and phone) was 5:1 vs cash even in a tiny country pub.
I would also suggest that the main reason shops and pubs are wary of forgeries with 50s is that they seem them so much less often that the staff are less switched on to the forgeries -- although there were some jolly good fake 20s going round, we saw enough of the real ones for it to become second nature to detect the forgeries.
Although somewhat tongue in cheek, for a long time I've said that if you want to forge a note, just make up your own: it saves the effort of trying to accurately reproduce an existing one. Hand it over and say 'oh, it's one of the new <inert denomination here> notes. Have you not seen one before?"
We've already got complaints from the usual morons that it "isn't diverse enough".
Have we?
I've seen thousands of blustery anti-pc , anti jsw , daily mail types saying "Its PC gone MAD!" , cant say anything these days! bbc agenda! ticking the boxes!
railing against some percieved and often imagined attempt at equality .
.
.and yet its very very rare to hear from the "offended snowflakes"
people assume SJWs will be upset and start yelling about it when no one has in fact said anything.
Most of the "Cancel Culture" and PC movement is largely powered and gains its momentum by the apoplectic rage of its opponents, in a kind of self sustaining reaction
it is, but Ive only held one personally in cash in 30 years,and I wouldnt even know what the current one is supposed to look like without looking it up online. I havent even held any notes or used a cash machine for over a year now, so it seems abit meaningless all told
£50 notes the currency of corrupt elites, of crime of all sorts and of tax evasion
And Japanese tourists. The last time my Japanese friends visited they'd changed their money in Japan and been given £50s for most of it. Not the best option, although they learned the phrase "have you got anything smaller" quite quickly.
>I can't tell why any reference to Turing also has to reference his sexuality?
Age 23, wrote seminal paper on computable numbers and the fundamental model for modern computing
In WW2, played a critical part in decoding German military and naval communications
Age 39, was chemically castrated by the UK state for consensual sex
2 years later killed himself
Now can you tell?
It's a while since I've done any travel across the British Isles, but I found there is was a lot of ignorance, and I doubt very much if the situation has improved about the different bank notes in circulation and what should be acceptable as legal tender, in the South of England. In variably, after a trip to Scotland or Northern Ireland, I'd have Pound Sterling bank notes issued by the local banks - which, whilst not actual "Bank Of England" Pound Sterling notes, due to the way they get issued, should be perfectly acceptable. In the end, I gave up presenting them in random shops - petrol stations on the whole were not a problem.
FWIW, Scottish bank notes are not legal tender even in Scotland, never mind England. The Bank of England says so.
Legally, only Royal Mint coins and Bank of England notes are legal tender in England and Wales. In Scotland and NI, only Royal Mint coins are legal tender.
In terms of everyday usage, a shopkeeper can legally choose what to accept or refuse as payment for goods.
This.
Shopkeepers are not obliged to sell anything at all - the prices you see on the shelf edge are not an offer, they are an "invitation to treat". When you go to the checkout, you are making an offer to buy the goods, rather than accepting their "offer" to sell. The shopkeeper can accept or decline (more or less) as they see fit, including based on how you propose to pay*. The contract is complete if and when the shopkeeper accepts your money (consideration).
"Legal tender" has very specific meaning in law - it is any form of payment that must be able to satisfy the repayment of a debt. It has nothing at all to do with normal shopping.**
* Unless they fall foul of anti-discrimination laws.
** This is my understanding as a non-lawyer ***. I took A-level law, and got a D. So I went into IT.
*** Any actual lawyers reading, please tell me all the things I got wrong above. I realise it's (at best) a simplification.
The ones making the laws mostly didn't study law, they all studied PPE (no, not that PPE, the other one) at Oxford, or even worse, Classics.
The notable exception, of course, being the current Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition, who not only studied law, went on to practise it, became a top barrister (QC) and then the Attorney General (head lawyer of the CPS), and got knighted for his service to the Crown as a result. Perhaps people should pay more attention to him, rather than the sack of blubber opposite him...
There are limits on some coins (less than £1) as to how much they are legal tender:
https://www.royalmint.com/help/trm-faqs/legal-tender-amounts/
has a list. No, you can't pay a £10,000 fine in 1p coins. But you could in £1 coins.
(The Mint claims these limits apply throughout the UK. Any Scottish law experts able to confirm or refute this?)
Family had a shop near a showground and a hospital. Show folk were very credit worthy (much better than the local doctors & lawyers) getting a £200 odd 'fill the lorry with food for a trip' paid in pennies was not unusual. PS. we never bothered counting the bags of coin, it would be correct, our bank said the same and just accepted the bags as marked.
After the Vegan backlash against the plastic £5/£10/£20 notes for containing tiny amounts of animal products (the very air you breathe contains tiny amounts of animals), how long before a religious shopkeeper declines the new £50 based on the sexuality of the person depicted on it? Not that it matters much as cash is all but dead anyways.