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The Rainbow Vegetarian Café in Cambridge, England, has announced that it will not accept the new £5 polymer notes, introduced by the Bank of England in September. Last week the British vegan community discovered that the notes contain trace amounts of beef tallow, which is animal fat, and are therefore unacceptable by their cruelty-free standards. A heated online controversy has resulted, including a petition asking the Bank to remove tallow from the polymer.
The Rainbow Café's owner, Sharon Meijland, told The Telegraph that her stance was announced last Wednesday, at the end of a BBC radio interview on the unrelated topic of Christmas food.
"We sponsor the Vegan Fair and announced on Wednesday we would not be accepting the £5 notes because they are dubious ethically. We have been providing food for vegans for 30 years and have tried to be as ethical as we possibly can...This is not just a restaurant, it's a restaurant where tiny details like this are really important."
Is any of our money cruelty-free?
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:18PM
Money is power in the form of currency. Money was invented by men because men realized easy transition of power creates stable system.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:43PM
Nonsense. Money was invented because people couldn't trust the purity of the gold they were being asked to accept, so this family associated with government (I'm not sure if it was originally government, and it could well have been the king) started issuing small bars of gold embossed with their seal as a guarantee of its purity. This was the foundation of the wealth of Croesus.
Of course, contracts of various forms predate that by a long time, so if you want to consider a hunk of mud with a picture of a donkey on it, and somebody's seal, to be money, then it goes so far back that we can't trace it. But it pre-dates writing, and was one of the foundations on which writing was built.
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(Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Wednesday December 07 2016, @12:17AM
David Graeber hypothesizes money was popularized by the advent of nation-states needing to fund standing armies. The armies were necessarily non-local, being coaxed or forced away from their original standing as productive members of a local community's economy. This dislocation forced a transition, from long-term, relationship-based bartering-type transactions, towards the use of fiat currency that was useful for the short-term and semi-anonymous transactions characterized by an army member's "stranger in the city" situation.
Your assertion that the transition to fiat currency was based on trust fits this theory. But Graeber's POV is that governments created the need in the first place for fiat currency, as a replacement for the long-term trusting/interdependent relationships that characterized a hyper-local, bartering-based economy.
Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:46AM
I think that armies were a secondary growth, and the original consumers of money were merchants.
OTOH, you can point to small "armies" that predate the existence of money, and it is true that agricultural populations couldn't, in many social structures, support a standing army without money. One could point to Sparta as a potential exception. They had money, but it was, by law, based on iron, and thus not readily portable, so effectively they were without money.
OTOH, it partly depends on how you define army. The Aryan invasion of India required a large "army", and was before the existence of money. But the "army" was an entire tribe. I'm not sure about the timing of the Hittites conquering Egypt, but that may also have been prior to the existence of money. And certainly in the middle east large armies started being common after money was invented. But this also corresponded with the time of the centralization of power and control being rapidly increased. And tax records go back far prior to money as normally understood.
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(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday December 07 2016, @03:32AM
I have heard that theory but in all of its forms that theory fails to explain why people love gold so much (diamond-water paradox). Anything that is commonly used for barter and doesn't hold any intrinsic value by itself is money. If you look at little kids in poor villages you will inadvertently find them bartering with random stuff used as money such leaf, some particular rock, or marbles. I think we suffer from associating invention of money with finding historical money in non-perishable format i.e. gold. There is no reason to believe money wasn't used before gold was discovered and in fact there is no reason to believe money wasn't used among small tribes that could manage it personally. I propose the very invention of civilization (as in classical civilizations) is due to invention of money that makes it worthwhile be part of the system by making transactions easier.
Leaving all that and just focusing on kids who play with marbles - they don't care about gold - they care about establishing an order of power (who is better player than whom) and invention of money makes it very easy to always know, assert, and barter that power over time.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday December 07 2016, @06:53PM
That's plausible, and is why (in one of my comments) I mentioned that it depends on what you are willing to consider money. Certainly the oldest *known* thing that can be called "money" is balls of clay with clay figures hidden inside them. These were "promissory notes", or, if you will, IOUs. Calling them money is a bit uncertain, however, because it depends on what you mean by money. There's no necessary conversion rate between a donkey and a chicken. And certainly trading items predated the promissory notes, but barter isn't using money.
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(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Thursday December 08 2016, @07:01AM
Money, as in currency, is still IOU and nothing else, except that if you don't honor it goons (police) will come and harass you (by putting you in criminal justice system) and society won't interrupt (by voting for a government). The conversion rate is natural outcome when large number of people start participating on same system. To take your example, it is very possible that I can sell a donkey for a chicken via eBay today - I pay the seller of chicken 1$ and he uses that to buy donkey from me in 1$. But if a large number of people start selling donkeys and chickens on eBay the conversion rate will automatically emerge from the averaging. That is what I was saying - the whole invention of money is only to ease the transaction so more people can participate in it. Money, in that way, is literally nothing but power.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday December 08 2016, @07:39PM
You can only do that if there is some way of standardizing the quality of chickens and donkeys. Which is one of the reasons gold was favored, and which is why a trusted certification of purity was important. When you buy something it is presumed that there is some way of assuring the quality of the received merchandise. If there isn't, the system soon breaks down.
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(Score: 1) by Francis on Wednesday December 07 2016, @04:04AM
Money was invented because society needed a way of storing funds. Prior to the invention of money, you had to barter for the things you needed. If you didn't need something right then or know what you'd need in the future, you had a bit of a problem. Plus, if you got into a bad situation because you forgot or didn't offer anything of value, you couldn't get your way out of it.
With money, we can earn money and then spend it at a time when it's more convenient. Which is rather hard to do with milk, pork bellies or goats. And good luck if you needed to spllit a cow between two people that didn't want their share at the same time. Money fixes all that fairly conveniently.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday December 07 2016, @07:04PM
That's why money was more generally useful than the prior systems, but IOUs, or contracts for payment, predate money, and were transferable. The thing is, "If some one promises a donkey in exchange for the IOU, do you trust him to trade you a donkey that isn't at death's door?". The guy who makes the original deal may have reason to trust the guy he makes the deal with, but what about a guy who trades with him? So things like lumps of metal that were presumably trustworthy were traded (i.e., actual goods) rather than IOUs when it was feasible. But then impure hunks of metal that were hard to tell from the good stuff started being traded by some who were less than totally honest. So somebody put his name on the line, and started marking hunks of metal with his seal (for a price) as a guarantee of purity. Which is when I decided to call it money. But you could really point at any point of the development and say "That's when I start calling it money.". The exact point of demarcation is nearly arbitrary. Some people are uncomfortable calling it money until it's in the form of coins, and that's OK as long as they make clear what they mean. The classical Greeks, however, decided to say that the division came when this family started putting their seal on bars of gold, and that's as good a marker as any.
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