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posted by on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:27PM   Printer-friendly
from the money-is-murder dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday December 07 2016, @03:32AM

    by cubancigar11 (330) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @03:32AM (#438193) Homepage Journal

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday December 07 2016, @06:53PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday December 07 2016, @06:53PM (#438463) Journal

    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

      by cubancigar11 (330) on Thursday December 08 2016, @07:01AM (#438653) Homepage Journal

      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

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday December 08 2016, @07:39PM (#438819) Journal

        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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