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from the With-great-powr-comes-great-responsibilty dept.
Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956_
Red faces after discovery $2.3bn worth of currency has a misprint of the word responsibility in banknote's 'micro-text'
46 million of Australia's new $50 notes have been printed with a typo, the Reserve Bank has confirmed.
The "new and improved" $50 banknote was rolled out in October last year, with a host of new technologies designed to improve accessibility and prevent counterfeiting.
But the yellow note also contains a typo that misspells the word "responsibility".
The note features the Indigenous writer and inventor David Unaipon on one side, and Edith Cowan, Australia's first female member of parliament, on the other – as it has since 1995.
The RBA has printed "micro-text" on the note with excerpts of Unaipon's book, Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, and Cowan's first speech to parliament.
The small error occurred on Cowan's side, in the text of her speech.
"It is a great responsibilty [sic] to be the only woman here, and I want to emphasise the necessity which exists for other women being here," it says.
Also at Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC and The New York Times.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Gaaark on Friday May 10 2019, @04:59PM (5 children)
Who's 'responsible' for this?
:)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 4, Funny) by NPC-131072 on Friday May 10 2019, @05:08PM (2 children)
What's the punishment, will it be an eye for an 'i'?
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday May 10 2019, @10:02PM
Someone who was told repeatedly that there is "no I in team" was becoming offended that that word already had two and was calling for a third one.
It was all to protect the readers from offense.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @12:20PM
given the amount of people recently imported to live for the whole eye for an eye thing? possible
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @09:58PM
You mean Whose responsibel for this?
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday May 12 2019, @01:12AM
What I'd like to know is who discovered this? It's not visible to the naked eye, so there must be someone out there who goes through life with a loupe jammed to their eye looking for microscopic imperfections in things.
(Score: 3, Funny) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday May 10 2019, @05:08PM (5 children)
It's just an alternatively factual method of spelling it!
Now I'm of to spend some curency for some of my dets, privy and pooblic.
G'day!
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday May 10 2019, @05:12PM (1 child)
You can take those notes to the privy, for wiping!
(Score: 3, Informative) by krishnoid on Friday May 10 2019, @09:06PM
And when you're done, you can just wash them off [rba.gov.au]!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @08:29PM (1 child)
Down Under has their own orange guy?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @12:24PM
no we have abos as you can see from the spelling on the recent bank not release
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @12:22PM
Oh, Come on, you can do better than that.
How about 'With this latest use of the word by the Government the dictionary and Scrabble rules WILL be updated to reflect this alternatvie spelling'
<sarcasm>see wut eye deed their?</sarcasm>
(Score: 2) by Snow on Friday May 10 2019, @05:11PM (5 children)
It's not an obvious mistake. It took me a couple minutes to see what was wrong, and that was knowing there was an error...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @05:36PM (2 children)
I would think they have the text in some word processor application before printing it, so that you don't need to just check it of a printed bill.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @06:04PM (1 child)
Blame it on autocorrect? That's a great idea!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @12:39PM
no no no
this is the new millenium
blame speeling mistaeks on the lack of autocorrect not the lack of professional ability
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Friday May 10 2019, @05:57PM (1 child)
Could the misspelling be an anti counterfeiting measure?
What doesn't kill me makes me weaker for next time.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by danmars on Friday May 10 2019, @06:41PM
Yes. In fact, that would be my default assumption. But the article includes a quote from a spokesperson:
Of course, even that statement doesn't state it was an accident.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @05:12PM (3 children)
speling is white privilege
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Runaway1956 on Friday May 10 2019, @05:14PM (2 children)
Spelling is the white man's burden. Nobody else gives a damn, so it's left up to the white man. The Arabs have it easy - they can change spellings on a whim. Names, places, objects, you name it. Just don't mess with Allah Akhbar!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday May 10 2019, @06:06PM
Do they change spelling on the fly in the native language? Or is that mostly seen in the way words are transliterated into English? Look how many ways the single word "Quoran" / "Koran" etc is transliterated and pronounced in English.
A different example would be the Hebrew tetragrammaton. (the personal name of God) The ancient Hebrew does not have the modern vowel markings that would clear everything up. And we don't have an audio recording of how Abraham or Moses pronounced the word. English speakers have two seemingly very different transliterations for the same word: Jehovah and Yahweh. You wouldn't even think they are the same actual ancient word. (nevermind the glyphs of ancient Hebrew changing form in modern Hebrew. The same alphabet, but every letter is written with a different glyph now. Like replacing our 26 letters with 26 strange new symbols, but all word spellings are the same, just the printing is now different.)
Maybe there are examples in other languages.
But English speakers would never get spelling wrong. As Dan Quayle told the child in the spelling bee, now put the "e" on the end of "potato" to complete the word.
What doesn't kill me makes me weaker for next time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @01:02PM
spelling? they need to develop a language first
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Friday May 10 2019, @05:47PM (6 children)
Might want to get get a bunch of freshly printed notes from the bank.
This kind of thing can make a coin/bill worth way more than the face value of the coin/bill later.
Fun fact; There really were $3 bills printed in the USA at one time [dailyherald.com]
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @06:07PM (5 children)
With only 46 million of them in circulation, and the entire world knowing about it, the value is bound to go up ... /s
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PinkyGigglebrain on Friday May 10 2019, @07:44PM (4 children)
Are you familiar with the Inverted Jenny [wikipedia.org] stamp? Currently valued at around a million US$.
And a US penny from 1943 that was accidently made from copper has been recently valued at 1.7 million US$.
Even something a common as a 24 cent postage stamp or a coin made in error can be worth a lot of money given enough time. And yeah, in this case its probably going to take a lot of time. So get a few bills now and your (great?(great?)) grand children might profit!
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday May 10 2019, @09:58PM
The thing about the supposed value of a rare collectible is finding someone who can both afford it, and wants it badly enough to pay that kind of money. Need a particular kind of rich idiot, the sort of person who has a lot more money than sense. Obviously, the intrinsic value of a rare coin or stamp is no more than the value of similar common items. If you have such an item and can afford to shop it around for a few years, then you might, just might be able to sell it for its supposed value. If you can't be that patient, you will have to settle for much less. I have the feeling those million dollar valuations are mostly for suckering rich idiots into thinking they got a real steal if they pay only $0.1 million for one.
I ditched my coin collection a year ago. Turned out I didn't have anything really valuable. Coin collecting is dead anyway. Coin collectors are almost all old people. Young people have lots more interesting things to do. What counted was the metal. Silver coins were worth only their weight in silver, didn't much matter what it was. Foreign coins were just so much scrap metal. Managed to get $3 per pound, which was actually more than the face value of the Canadian cents, but rather less than the Canadian 5 cent coins. Costs more in shipping to return foreign coins to their nation of origin than they are worth. Most of the domestic coins were merely face value. The one exception was the wheat ear pennies. Yeah, the coin collecting book says even those in poor condition are worth 10 cents or more each. Nope! The coin shop offered 2 cents each, double the face value, but nowhere near what the coin book claimed. For an Eisenhower dollar, they would pay ... $1! But they were happy to sell Eisenhower dollars for $3 each.
Thanks to comprehensive information now available online, I was finally able to identify 2 foreign coins I've had for years. They did not have Latin characters. One was an Arabic script, and when I finally figured out which symbols were the numbers, and could pick out a year, I read "1327". I didn't think that coin could possibly be nearly 700 years old, and sure enough it wasn't. That's the year according to the Arabic calendar. Corresponds to about 1911. Still a somewhat impressive age of 1 century, and it was silver. The coin was from Egypt, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire in its last years. Pretty cool, but meh, plenty of pictures of way more coins in better condition than the one I had. Oh, the other coin was a 1970s baht, from Thailand. Yet another different script and calendar.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @10:03PM (1 child)
Yes, yes I am. I'm also familiar with this fact from the article you linked:
Now, I'm not a math major, and my calculator has a day job as a phone, but I believe 46,000,000 is greater than 100 by at least a whole bunch.
And there were only seven of those pennies made of copper. Seven is even less than 100 (which is a whole bunch less than 46,000,000).
Well, that would require me to reproduce. And the chances of that happening are much closer to 46,000,000 - 1 than 100 - 1.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @12:49PM
At the going rate to raise a child is at least a quarter of a million these days how long exactly will it take to pay off if you keep a stack of them in the attic for a few decades?
(Score: 5, Funny) by SomeGuy on Friday May 10 2019, @11:01PM
And that's just from inflation!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by danmars on Friday May 10 2019, @06:04PM (4 children)
I work in ID authentication, and deliberate "mistakes" are not uncommon.
Sometimes mistakes are huge and can't be ignored, like misspelling "Commercial" in the type name that's in big letters, but in microtext? Say it was on purpose.
Special bonus points if the RBA did do it on purpose, and they're only changing it because the counterfeiters and/or reporters noted the deliberate mistake and it's not useful anymore.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @08:02PM
I was thinking something similar, but it doesn't actually work. There are two options:
1) People don't know about the spelling mistake. Therefore people won't be able to use the misspelled word as counterfeit detection, or worse, think genuine bills are counterfeit.
2) People do know about the spelling mistake, so counterfeiters will incorporate that into their prints.
Intentional mistakes are useful when you have limited people who need to authenticate a document, but not for general public consumption items.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday May 11 2019, @01:49AM (2 children)
Some typical Australian male was told by his newly-formed diversity committee that the mint he works for is going to move in a more "PC" direction. So he did what any other patriotic White male of his country would do, and subtly stalled by throwing his own monkey wrench into the gears of political correctness.
We in America had a similar situation, averted, when Obama made his push to have Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. Looking back, I realize that this would have been a good thing, as $20 is the magic number for low-level addicts looking to purchase street drugs. Grams of weed, a couple rocks of crack or 2 Oxycontins, the $20 dollar denomination is the perfect equilibrium between suck-your-dick-for-a-cheeseburger desperate and casual-but-not-addict dope-dealings. Martin Luther King would have probably been the best Black choice for a dollar bill, though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @12:51PM (1 child)
RACIST! How DARE you! Recant your filthy sewerage of a statement and never ever again include a person's skin colour when making a statement.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday May 12 2019, @11:00PM
What about the Jews? Can we call Jewish a skin color?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @06:16PM (3 children)
between L and T.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Friday May 10 2019, @07:47PM (2 children)
I've always had trouble remembering that weird mnemonic.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @08:04PM
I've never had the abilty to remember that too. I blame the irresponsibilty of my teachers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @12:53PM
I smell deceit
(Score: 2) by TrentDavey on Friday May 10 2019, @06:43PM (3 children)
I'm not enough of an economics boffin to figure out if squirreling away currency by people would be a good or bad thing - and for whom. If everyone buys a $50 note and puts it away in their "collection", never to be spent, doesn't that mean the money printer (government) is ahead?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday May 10 2019, @10:27PM (2 children)
Most definitely. The government loves coin collectors. With one proviso: the face value of the money needs to be more than the value of the materials. The moment that's not true, people start grabbing all the undervalued coinage to convert them to their real market value. That's why there are no longer any silver or gold coins in general circulation. I am not sure why so many copper cents are still in circulation, now that they are worth a bit more than 1 cent each. Must not be enough more valuable to warrant the cost of sorting through mountains of pennies. Hyperinflation can also spoil things.
You didn't think that, starting in the late 1990s, the US rolled out all those states quarters, and then the national parks quarters, and the commemorative quarters, and the nickels and other changes to coins just for fun, did you? Also, the US really wants to dump the cent. Gotten hard to manufacture cents for less than 1 cent each.
The term for this is seigniorage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @06:45AM
In most countries it is illegal to destroy coins that way.
Nobody does it to gold coins because the gold value is almost always worth less than or equal the coins' value to a collector.
Silver is in the middle, sometimes it is technically worth doing, but even those coins mostly retail for more than the silver value. Collecting silver coins out of circulating currency is time consuming for a small return.
To make a profit on melting copper coins you would have to collect so many you would almost certainly be caught.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday May 12 2019, @11:07PM
Our Pennies are phoney as hell. The outside is a beautiful Orange. Looks great, but don't be fooled. It's just a thin orange "skin." And the inside is something else. Something that, I'm told is very very cheap. Fake money!!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @06:45PM
and i thought they misprinted the "500" to read "50".
we will see if money cannot buy the w.r.ight spelling afterall :)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Rupert Pupnick on Friday May 10 2019, @07:32PM
I'm all for equality of opportunity for everyone, but if you ask me, that's not a particularly compelling bit of parliamentary oratory.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday May 10 2019, @08:31PM
This would be a great pre-roll ad spot for all the Grammarly ads I've been seeing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 10 2019, @09:32PM (1 child)
Inquiring minds need to kno!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @06:49AM
Nobody is paying $2.3bn. They will either use them or print replacements.
42 million notes is less than half a million printed sheets. Even with serial numbers and fancy polymer stock it would cost much less than a million to reprint them.
(Score: 3, Funny) by darkfeline on Saturday May 11 2019, @05:46AM
You think that's impressive?
Let me tell you a story about the HTTP Referer header.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Sunday May 12 2019, @12:36PM
With great powr comes great responsibilty.