SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 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.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.