Background: I'm British and live in the UK but have spent a fair amount of time in the US over the years.
I love the dollar bill. I'd really love to have a £1 and/or £2 note in the UK. The moment you need any reasonable number of coins to buy anything they become unwieldy in your pocket and you can carry enough dollar bills to be useful without there being a chunk of metal digging into your leg.
I've hears arguments against relating to durability but those are all predate the new plastic notes we have.
For some reason I get a load of pushback when suggesting that a £1 or £2 note would be nice to have.
I think with polymer notes, they might last until withdrawn by UK standards, but that's a unique factor of how fast they cycle their banknotes out. I think even 5 year old English notes (the paper GBP50 with Watt on it) are at the phase where you have to take them to a bank and replace them with polymer ones.
America has always tried to avoid calling back old notes, likely to avoid creating an upset in places where they're a store of value overseas. This means the old ones can circulate basically forever. I can recall my brother getting a $10 note of the 1934 type in a normal transaction in about 2015, and 1977-series $100s seemed strangely common into the 1990s and 2000s. So the survival rates at 10 and 20 years are relevant for American paper in a way that maybe don't apply in the UK.
They are also far more durable than bills, specially lower-denomination bills like the $1 note that wears out quickly because it is used more than higher-denomination bills.
I am curious what the cost difference is to manufacture a coin vs a banknote. Certainly the penny is probably going to not be worth much more than a penny in melt value, but for stuff like quarters if I can make 5 bills that each last 5 years that may be more preferential than a single coin that lasts 25 years because it gives better control over the money supply.
I use them almost exclusively as collectors items for whatever country I visit. And nothing else. America is mostly cashless nowadays anyway. My thought is that at least in America, we will not be rid of coins for another few decades at least . Because gauging by the current climate it looks like the only way we start to phase some of these denominations out is when inflation makes them impractical and useless.
They are mostly relegated to a jar that you take to the coin exchange once every X years. I honestly don’t remember the last time I actually carried coins and paid for something with them (aside from receiving them as change and dumping in said jar) but it was over a decade ago that I used to actually carry change in my pocket for use. Could have probably been two decades ago almost.
Probably the most actionable use I have for coins in todays era is having a quarter for the deposits for the carts at the Aldi lot.
Somewhat related. Some US people came to visit our UK office back in about 2001, amongst them "Randy Bush". That entertained us. Also, there used to be a guy at Novell called "Randy Bender".
I've worked with US and EU companies extensively over many years and my experience is that low (it depends greatly where you are what this means) tech salaries have effectively nothing to do with EU privacy regulation, and everything to do with historical cost of living and culture, and the large amount of inertia it takes to change especially the latter.
There are businesses in the US that rely on wafer thin privacy regulation to exploit people's data, but it's very very possible to build a business that doesn't require it to function.
I've got a number of YouTube channel recommendations if you weren't aware of them already (https://willj.net/posts/youtube-sailing-channel-recommendati...). A large number of those channels have done a lot of off-shore sailing, and many have done multiple ocean crossings.
One sailor that I enjoy watching is Patrick Laine[1]. The back catalog has a lot of coastal single-handing (coast of France mostly). Then he started circling the Atlantic.
Thank you, I will have a look :)
This YT channel is gem I found: https://www.youtube.com/@SailingTipsCa
Doesn't post a lot, not very high production quality but very high quality information.
Mozzy is by far the best and most detailed channel out there for the AC, 10/10 recommend.
Has the systems understanding, ability (and confidence) to make predictions, while keeping the video's at a length that is still digestible.
Also has a nice speaking voice which brings a level of classiness to it.
No, these are all cruisers rather than racers. There's a mix of sailing and lifestyle, but then for a lot of them it's hard to just film the sailing because there's only so much sailing you can actually do when you live on your boat.
Location: UK (though have worked for US companies remotely coast to coast since 2008)
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No, but will travel
Technologies: Ruby on Rails, Postgres, Aurora, Go, AWS, GCP, Terraform, Linux Sysadmin, heroku, Nginx.
Résumé/CV: https://willj.net/about/hire-me/january-2024-ian8ah/
Email: will@willj.net
Hi, I'm Will Jessop, currently the now part time CTO of Impactive looking for new opportunities in Rails application scaling and performance or technical leadership. Technically I have a huge amount of experience in scaling and optimising Ruby on Rails applications, Postgres database performance and scalable application architecture. I also have a lot of experience managing a team of 19 people, mostly engineers. I'm product focussed, and among other successes re-orged the product pipeline at Impactive to improve delivery reliability and quality outcomes, while drastically improving staff morale.
Employment history includes Impactive, Rubytune, 37Signals/Basecamp and Engineyard.
I'd argue that thinking solely in terms of potential investment opportunity isn't capturing the whole value of trading on your local country's stock exchange. It's more money and a larger investor pool today, but less choice and power over one's destiny tomorrow. These sorts of economic micro-decisions accumulate. Where to put a company HQ, what stock exchange to trade on, hiring locally or abroad, selling up to foreign equity funds. As individual business decisions, the leaders might think it's an insignificant drop in the pond and simply the most important thing is making revenue tick up, but there are consequences to that being your only metric of success. It's jumping ship while the rest of the crew is trying to plug holes and bail it out. You've successfully escaped the sinking ship but are now in deep, shark-infested waters.
Perhaps I've just been reading too much on geopolitical power dynamics lately, but as a British person, I fear our economy is suffering from a death-by-a-thousand-cuts from seemingly "insignificant" decisions that pass on tiny parts of our sovereignty to other countries. In the case of companies trading on other exchanges, we're leaving ourselves more open to the whims of the investors on that exchange whose priorities and sentiments don't match the spirit of the country of origin.
The wealthiest and most popular exchange brings in the most money. Exchanges realize this and try to sweeten the deal if their exchange is short on a few things. It is not all about money on the table.
I did a quick Google. The pi 5 4GB MSRP is $60 I think, there are some available on Amazon UK for £54.90 with delivery tomorrow. That's apparently $69.53, so above MSRP, but not terrible. There may be cheaper sources I've not googled hard.
Location: UK (though have worked for US companies remotely coast to coast since 2008)
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: No, but will travel
Technologies: Ruby on Rails, Postgres, Aurora, Go, AWS, GCP, Terraform, Linux Sysadmin, heroku, Nginx.
Résumé/CV: https://willj.net/about/hire-me/january-2024-ian8ah/
Email: will@willj.net
Hi, I'm Will Jessop, currently the now part time CTO of Impactive looking for new opportunities in Rails application scaling and performance or technical leadership. Technically I have a huge amount of experience in scaling and optimising Ruby on Rails applications, Postgres database performance and scalable application architecture. I also have a lot of experience managing a team of 19 people, mostly engineers. I'm product focussed, and among other successes re-orged the product pipeline at Impactive to improve delivery reliability and quality outcomes, while drastically improving staff morale.
Employment history includes Impactive, Rubytune, 37Signals/Basecamp and Engineyard.
I love the dollar bill. I'd really love to have a £1 and/or £2 note in the UK. The moment you need any reasonable number of coins to buy anything they become unwieldy in your pocket and you can carry enough dollar bills to be useful without there being a chunk of metal digging into your leg.
I've hears arguments against relating to durability but those are all predate the new plastic notes we have.
For some reason I get a load of pushback when suggesting that a £1 or £2 note would be nice to have.
reply