This belongs next to Standfords research into sterilising white males. "Harmful language"? Sounds like a dystopian dictatorial nightmare. "We're enslaving you to protect you from yourselves..." should be their new motto.
This is obviously the first part of a major push to force us to use Central Bank Digital Currencies. Now that they are banning cash, we will be controlled like never before. This is the beginning of the end of freedom.
You don’t need CBDC, just the existing system today. Here in the UK something like 3% of money is available as paper cash. The rest is just a row in a database.
Assets are zero sum - if i sell you my car, i no longer have that asset. Money is not zero sum. It is created and destroyed as loans are made and repaid. Which kinda frazzles people’s minds when they hear it. I know it certainly did mine when i first learned.
Yup, this shock comes from the wrong idea of money as some kind of a physical object that you obtain by performing work, whereas it's more of a different name for debt. It's a social construct. Also, you absolutely do not need any kind of banks for this to emerge, in fact it's pretty much inevitable unless you always barter (for other goods or so called "hard currencies" like gold) and do so immediately. Immediacy is surprisingly important too.
> Money is not zero sum. It is created and destroyed as loans are made and repaid.
I don't think this is true. Every transaction, even the ones that take place in the rows of a bank's database and not with physical money, involve an amount added to some account and an identical amount subtracted from another account. Even loans don't create money: the issuing bank have the amount subtracted from its reserves the exact moment the loan is made available to you.
The only method to create money would be writing a check with no date on it, which is illegal in many countries.
What you are stating was perhaps the previous orthodoxy, but in the last few years even major institutions[1] have come to agree that banks do indeed create money when they create certain kinds of loans; the upshot of which is that 90%+ of money in circulation in western countries has been created through mortgage issuance.
Imagine the whole world has 1,000,000 dollars right now. This is made up of all cash.
You have 100,000 of those dollars. You decide to buy a car for $10,000 from a friend. You go look at the car, like it, and agree to buy it. You sign the necessary paperwork and you tell your friend that you will bring him the 10,000 cash tomorrow. You drive home.
You just created 10,000 out of thin air. The world right now has 1,010,000 of money. It is made up of all that cash, and the debt you owe your friend. The debt you owe your friend is an asset. If it was drawn up more formally, it can be used to buy things, similarly to how the greenbacks in your pocket buy thing.
Now you might be thinking that this money does not exist because of the offsetting liability. You are right that in a ledger it nets out to zero. However, “money” is not the net balance. Money is the cash, and unpaid loans side of the ledger.
Every dollar that exists was “loaned out” into existence by the government, banks, companies, and people. It will be destroyed the moment it gets paid back.
Don’t confuse money with net balances or with pieces of paper with green ink on them. Those are the things that we colloquially think of as money. But when you dig to really understand money, you eventually get to the fact that it’s all stacks of debt.
It might be helpful to expand the example to make it even clearer.
Until you repay the debt to your friend, you can spend the 10,000, because you hold it in your pocket. But your friend can also spend the debt you own him, for example, by asking another person to get a loan on that loan.
So yeah, "free money"! Until one creditor somewhere in that long chain asks the debitor to pay up their debt...
>> Even loans don't create money: the issuing bank have the amount subtracted from its reserves
Not even the old system (fractional reserve) referred to in the fed link above works that way. The new system deletes what was left of fractional reserve policy.
> You don’t need CBDC, just the existing system today. Here in the UK something like 3% of money is available as paper cash. The rest is just a row in a database.
The point the GP is trying to make is that they want to further restrict the usage of cash in economic transactions, & that CBDCs further help in that regard. There's a difference between:
Assets aren't zero sum because you can produce more cars, etc.
Money is zero sum because almost all money is created through debt. Sum up all money and debt and you get roughly zero excluding central bank money and cash.
Money being backed by debt makes sense because it solves the "acceptance problem", that is, how do you make sure the money you have can actually buy things?
Of course that means there is no limit to how much money there is in the system.
>> Assets aren't zero sum because you can produce more cars, etc.
I’d need to exchange other tangible assets (raw materials) and labour to produce the next car, I can’t just make a car, a tangible asset, by declaring a new one exists.
I’m creating more value than the raw materials worth when i assemble them into a car - maybe the idea of value creation is what you’re digging at here and I’m misunderstanding?
In either case it’s zero sum. I have some form of asset or I don’t. The value of an asset is not the price of its raw materials, it’s whatever i can convince someone it’s worth. But valuation is nothing to do with the zero sum notion of transferring ownership of assets.
>> Money is zero sum … excluding central bank money and cash
That’s a contradiction. It’s either zero sum or it’s not.
But besides that it’s missing what zero sum means. The bank issuing a loan has provided you with value in the form of the loan funds but it hasn’t exchanged any tangible asset to provide you that money. It just created an asset from thin air (your loan is its new intangible asset). They can sell your loan to a pension fund but they they won’t own that asset anymore. You won’t have to repay 2 creditors if they sell your loan.
There’s a complication when you spend your loan with a merchant banked by another bank. Your bank will now have to transfer reserves at the central bank from their account to the merchant’s bank’s account at the central bank. If they don’t have enough reserves to cover this transfer, the central bank will create reserves and lend them it at the base rate.
>> Money being backed by debt
It’s not backed by anything, it’s just a promise
>> Of course that means there is no limit to how much money there is in the system
In theory true but in practice people will stop accepting your money if you hyperinflate it
Are you sure? M0 includes reserves - as in money deposited at the central bank by commercial banks. Reserves are increased by quantitative easing, the source of the additional reserves is nothing other than a decision.
Assets are luckily not zero-sum, that'd be horrifying. If I write some software, nothing has "disappeared". If you copy me a movie, you still have the movie. If I make a painting of build a table, a new asset has been created.
You’re talking about intangible assets. For better or worse, usually it’s a licence or contract that exists to artificially limit your ability to copy. When you’ve sold your licence to use the software, the software is effectively gone. It’s not always as simple as that. E.g. my brand is an intangible asset.
>> If I make a painting
That’s just a regular asset, once it’s sold you’ll need to paint a new one.
> For better or worse, usually it’s a licence or contract that exists to artificially limit your ability to copy.
I can assure you I didn't have to issue manual licenses or make manual copies for the millions of downloads that my open source software had this year. When someone downloaded it, no one found it missing from their project.
> once it’s sold you’ll need to paint a new one
Hence is not zero-sum, I can keep making them and the amount of assets keep increasing (non-zero sum). Zero-sum means that "whatever is gained by one side is lost by the other." By creating a new painting nothing is lost.
You did - if it was open source, you issued a copyleft licence that uses the system of copyright to disclaim your rights. It’s a licence.
Maybe you didn’t specify a licence, depending on your jurisdiction then perhaps the work is classed public domain automatically or more likely you’ve created a situation where technically your users are breaching your copyright.
>> I can keep making them
Sure, you can exchange some assets (paint, a canvas) and your labour to make a new asset (a painting).
>> By creating a new painting nothing is lost.
You’ll no longer have the paint or the canvas, you’ll have a painting. Zero sum.
> You did - if it was open source, you issued a copyleft licence that uses the system of copyright to disclaim your rights. It’s a licence.
I mean I didn't manually make each license, it's COPIED without nothing being removed from me. I can copy it once or a million times, nothing is removed and value is added, hence non-zero sum.
> You’ll no longer have the paint or the canvas, you’ll have a painting. Zero sum.
No, it's not the same, a painting has more value than the paint and canvas; hence not-zero sum. It's ridiculous to claim zero sum, that'd imply we cannot advance as a species and would still be dealing with pebbles.
Manually or automatically issuing is insignificant. Your work was automatically copyrighted when you wrote it, if you did nothing else - such as agreeing to exchange those rights for a salary from an employer, or declaring the software as licenced under specific terms, or performing the necessary actions in your jurisdiction to enter the works into the public domain, if you did none of these, then it’s yours to claim as an asset if you want.
>> nothing is removed and value is added
No asset was removed - ownership of the copyright of the software still remains unchanged when people copied your open source software.
However, no new asset was created. They derived value from your software hopefully but they didn’t gain a new asset.
What if you licenced it under a really permissive licence like apache? It’s still the same story. someone else can create their own asset by changing your apache licenced software and distributing it as theirs. They’re in breach of that particular licence if they try to redistribute completely unchanged work under a different licence.
>> a painting has more value than the paint and canvas
You’re conflating valuation with accounting. The value of an asset is a different and often subjective concern, from the accounting of ownership of it.
A painting has more value than it’s raw materials (hopefully!), but that tells us nothing about how to account for ownership of the asset.
If i have a case of beers that i bought for $50 and i take it to the beach and sell it for $100 to a group of thirsty friends, the valuation changed but the chain of custody of the asset was zero sum all through.
HN is no different than any other place on the internet. People on here are still just as gullible and manipulatable as any other person you encounter online.
Horrible take. 10k is a pittance. Small business owners, farmers, people buying and selling vehicles, etc. It’s not a large amount of money. If you go down to the apple store and buy a couple well specced computers the bill is going to be over 10k.
I very much doubt there are money people that walk into an apple store with 10k in their back pocket to pay for some computers.
Same with farmers. How many farmers living in this modern age are walking around with 10k in their back pockets? In the vast majority of cases, I would argue that people just use their bank account for such large payments these days.
For most businesses, cash is a far more likely point of failure.
Taking in large amounts of cash is ripe for robbery. It's also why a lot of places don't accept $100's after a certain time and etc because it gets really risky for the employees.
Government has control of your cash just as well.
If the central bank decides your bills are not recognized anymore, or that they want to print 1000% more of it, your cash value changes.
Which is Mutually Assured Destruction. I can't think of many occasions in which financial elites would destroy their own wealth in pursuit of political (?) goals.
The point is that you cannot do any meaningful amount of business if “the system” prevents you from banking, or malfunctions in some way that locks you out. Or more insidiously, if someone in power prevents you from banking because they do not like what you have to say. There is no longer a gray market relief valve. All unbanked business activity is illegal.
Blocking domestic and international commerce, and more importantly access for emergency services, goes a little beyond just "protesting" as most people see it, and it also probably isn't protected by whatever right to assemble/protest people have in Canada, if any(?).
Blocking domestic and international commerce, and more importantly access for emergency services, goes a little beyond just "protesting" as most people see it,
Blocking emergency services is a very, very weird thing. Loads of protests do so. Parades do so.
That said, the problem isn't "was it a protest or not", the problem is judicial oversight was suspended, by employing what used to be called The War Measures Act.
Yes, only some of the powers were used. Yet those powers were used to bypass all legal and constitutional protections, and snoop into bank accounts, and freeze bank accounts, again... all without judicial oversight.
None of these people had been charged. To this day, most of those who had their bank accounts snooped in, and frozen (and later thawed), were never charged with a crime.
This is not possible in Canada, legally, without using one of the most powerful laws at our disposal. And regardless of the protest length, or type, it wasn't an emergency.
Blockades at the borders, and in Alberta were cleared without issue, before the act was declared.
Lastly, compared to protests in some other democratic countries? It was nothing. Meaningless. Tiny. Trivial.
But again, most importantly -- agree or not, like or not, even if you hated those truckers, having the government declare an emergency, for something that was not? Then having that government use those powers to bypass the judicial branch?
Insane. Wrong. Horrifying.
Such laws should absolutely not be used to punish your political rivals!
It depends on how they got their income in the first place. My family are dairy farmers and frequently trade cattle at local auctions. This is still a cash based society (rural Ireland), it does not take many heads of cattle to make up 10k, many other deals are done informally (e.g. my grandfather buying cows from a neighbor without auction) with a value that is of that order. The money may hit a bank account if something more formal needs to be bought (insurance, new machinery etc) but those are not all that common.
As a child I would always remember my grandfather carrying (at least in the house) large rolls of bills.
A new Macbook Pros can easily be over $6k (16", upgraded ram, upgraded hard drive, etc). $10k is not that much money. People do pay for these laptops in cash.
A phone has cost over $1k for years. Think of the present rate of inflation. $10k is nothing, particularly a decade from now. Then think of two decades from now and this silly law still on the books.
I did exactly this at the Apple store for a 5k+ purchase. I do these things out of principle to make it harder to create profiles and support cash. It is the same why I prefer https over http.
Very few (if any) Apple stores will accept that amount in cash. A lot of stores and businesses (also the likes of Carrefour and Albert Heijn) have been phasing out setups needed for cash payments. Even if you find a way to pay cash, it will be on a separate (long and slow) queue or they will need to exceptionally call their supervisor to handle the payment.
They do accept that amount of cash. They do a dance where they take your cash, convert it to Apple gift cards at about $1k (or $2k?) each, then they apply those gift cards towards your purchase. Afterwards, they throw away the gift cards.
Large denomination Cash handling for legitimate businesses has been a hassle for a long time already. I’m not sure how many businesses want to handle large cash amounts.
Honestly, I feel like so much of the crypto space is due to that. Even in Brazil we have a pretty simple inter-bank transfer system used by virtually everybody. You just have to know an email or a phone.
A significant portion of the US population uses cash for everything. Only about 2/3 of Americans use traditional banks for their finances. Most of them are poor, so they're not making many transactions over 10k, but those people will pay for cars, rent, etc in cash.
Neither them nor Europeans are used to less benign governments.
And the problem with good governments (and fair elections and other properties of decent democracies) is that they can accidentally let bad actors in (populism is one helluva drug for the masses), and bad actors may attempt to undermine the institutions, turning democracies into kleptocracies and dictatorships if they succeed.
Then all those safeguards in the name of all that's good become perfect tools for abuse in the name of all the control over whoever dares to oppose the established order.
You'd also need the routing number for the bank as well as the name on the account, at a minimum. And what you're thinking of is ACH, which goes between institutions, not between individuals.
The routing and account numbers are on all paper checks you write. You can use them to set up ACH transfers to/from that account, with pretty minimal checks.
Those transfers have to go through heavily regulated institutions, however, all of whom have strict KYC laws. Of all the ways to try and steal someone's money, this would be fairly low on my list.
USA doesn't even have a standard way of normal humans transferring money electronically to each other, leading to a plethora of competing apps that try to solve this.
The US has a couple of ways that normal humans can transfer money electronically to each other. But they're old school (and require bank accounts) and that's why there are newer systems that people use instead.
There are upsides and downsides. Having an additional degree of separation is nice when I'm doing transactions with strangers. I prefer to use Venmo instead of Zelle for precisely that reason.
A guy bought a house in berlin. In cash. Actual cash. Nobody suspected anything because in Germany, cash is king. Of course there was money laundering, tax avoidance and all the common suspects on it.
There is no way I'm going to show up to buy a vehicle with that kind of cash on me, it's asking for a robbery.
The last time I saw someone use that much cash it was to buy a house in Amsterdam in the mid 80's, and even then it was frowned upon by the notary and the recipient. The notary made them deposit it into their bank account first and probably had to report the deal as 'unusual'.
I’d imagine it’s fairly unlikely you’re paying cash for that large amount, most people would choose a more convenient form of transfer surely?
How much time is wasted in these transactions just counting and verifying the money?
Also what if lots of people decided to transact like this. It’s not like the banks have paper to back all your deposits, they’d need time to go physically print paper if it became that popular a medium.
The solution is to make larger denominations, not ban cash sales. But then the government would give up power, so that isn't going to happen.
US dollars say explicitly "THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE", it would be ridiculous to say 'under $10000'.
Once the government has control what's to stop them doing like China has proposed, and make your virtual currency have velocity, meaning if you spend it today, it's worth $1, next week .9, and next month .5?
>Once the government has control what's to stop them doing like China has proposed, and make your virtual currency have velocity, meaning if you spend it today, it's worth $1, next week .9, and next month .5?
If you break down any transaction, it has three components. First, there is the agreement to trade some goods and services for some price. At this moment two debts are created. One is to deliver the money. The other is to deliver the goods and services. The 2nd and 3rd component is the delivery of the money and the delivery of the goods and services.
If you for a candy bar in cash all three happen at the same time. When you buy something and pay later, or pay up front and get something later, it’s easier to see the different components. When you buy stocks via a broker, it’s even more apparent.
I don’t think “need” is a good reason here or for anywhere else. You don’t need to pay for things in cash, you don’t need to make more money, you don’t need to play soccer.
What I mean is that for that sort of money, it would be somewhat strange to "want" to pay in cash. You wouldn't walk 200 miles on foot to go meet a friend when you had a car on the driveaway?
True but would you want it to be illegal if the vast majority people that did walk 200 miles on foot instead of driving, did it because they were doing it to get away with committing a crime?
I would not want walking far on foot to be illegal just because most people who actually did that were doing so to further a criminal goal, no. That is how we slide into authoritarianism.
It's the same reason I want a right to privacy; you could argue that most people who want to hide something from the state want it because they're doing something illegal, but I still find it valuable that I can do things without being tracked. It's the same as the right to go outside without any form of ID; most people who aren't up to anything illegal could make sure to always bring valid ID at all times, but I value the freedom to not be forced by the state to bring something. It's the same reason I would oppose a law that you must wear a GPS tracking device on you at all times; most people do it willingly with their phone and watch these days, and the only people the law would really affect would be criminals, but I value the freedom to go somewhere without being tracked.
I currently make all payments electronically, but I value the freedom to be able to transfer money without leaving traces of the transaction, even though I don't currently exercise that freedom. Because the state doesn't have any business micro-managing individuals' behaviour like that.
So make the criminal act at the end of the journey illegal, not the act of walking 200 miles on foot.
This feels like the question of Blackstone’s ratio: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” I’m not an absolutist about these things, but I take Blackstone’s side of this (very difficult) question.
It's not your money. It's partly mine and everyone else's in the country. Just like my money is partially yours. It's my business that you're paying your way in society in a correct manner so that I and others can benefit as part of a collective.
(Not that it's always fair but that's a different argument.)
Ah, so that's why the cops figure that having more than a few hundred in cash means it's partly theirs. Well, not partly, they generally seem to think is completely theirs.
At the current pace of inflation, in 20 years €10k won't even pay a month's rent for a house or decent flat. Demonetization laws with fixed monetary amounts under inflationary systems are tyrannical.
You probably shouldn't finance a vehicle you can afford with current interest rates, and you may not want to give your debit card to a secondhand dealer for processing.
While I do have fond memories of paying less than $10k for a beater, those days may not be coming back. In 10 years, high-end phones and computers could easily fall outside that limit too.
> I don't know anybody in real life who accesses their money via a phone.
I don't know anybody that doesn't. And that includes 80+ year olds... mobile gear is how people interact with the internet around here and the internet is how people interact with their banks.
I'm a relative old-timer, so have lived through plenty of times when electronic payments weren't commonplace, and have also bought a number of second-hand cars. I never used cash - I used banker's drafts, because I didn't want to be mugged and the untraceable cash to go missing. (And even then, they were all worth under €10k).
I'm not sure in a modern society why I would pull out $10k from my bank account to then pay a person $10k cash for a second hand car, so the answer is no.
Yeah this is pretty much the reason cops seize money from unbanked people who try to use their life savings to buy something decently expensive. Because who could possibly be dealing in that amount of cash legitimately, it must be criminal.
> Yeah this is pretty much the reason cops seize money from unbanked people who try to use their life savings to buy something decently expensive.
I think it's going over most people's heads that buying and selling cars on Craigslist isn't like buying a car from a dealer. I could potentially use bankers drafts but many sellers know this is a commonly forged document and the risk isn't acceptable to them. Almost every single company/bank digital payment service is reversible or able to be cancelled (I naively was not aware of this until I was a part of the early bitcoin-otc community and got to witness the myriad of scams people ran once the other medium wasn't actually reversible).
Right. But that is illegal and in my view also immoral. If you want to change the law campaign for it. But breaking tax laws is not a victimless crime. You are freeloading/stealing from the rest of us.
Edit - ah, I think you mean politicians? My comment still stands though. I don’t know the polling in the US, but spending on social programmes in Europe is broadly inline with public opinion, so the insunuation of a democratic deficit is misplaced, at least here.
Where I live people in my generation have been primarily cashless at least the last quarter of a century, and yet we still significantly outrank the US in the freedom indexes, which isn't exactly a high bar these days, but still serves to underline that the typical American centrist argument that using primarily paper cash somehow improves freedom is wrong.
The major “freedom indices” are polluted neoliberal ideological wankery that shouldn’t be used to settle a bar argument let alone decide that it’s totally fine to do away with large cash transactions.
Even limiting things to strictly “financial freedom” - while more germane to the cashless question and also happen to stick the US above all of Europe save Switzerland - are highly questionable due to the inclusion of weird subjective metrics like “labor regulations = less freedom”
evidence suggests the optimal amount law breaking is non-zero. that’s going to be very difficult against a regime that can track the movements of all money.
I'd be interested to see what freedoms you think you have that don't exist in the US. This is such a popular thing to say that I imagine it can be easily described.
There are very few remaining instances in the region where people still pay large sums in cash. Transaction costs are so low (and mostly nonexistent) that cash remains in use either in very specialised circumstances or as part of “grey economy” activities.
WHO CARES if it "only has a few instances". I will never understand where people will say that having our right LITERALLY REMOVED somehow isn't eroding our freedom. It simply is, you are objectively less free now.
The uppercase tells me you have strong feelings about this and maybe I’m missing something obvious. Would you explain why my freedom will be diminished by this? I can still pay and buy whatever I want. It just happens faster and more secure.
A common tactic of centralized control is to "boil the frog," so to speak. Start with a control that seems to most people to be lax enough to be "not that big a deal," and then later -- maybe years -- tighten the control once enough people are acclimated to the existence of the control in the first place.
If the government were to come along and say, "If you are female and are purchasing travel tickets between a state where abortion is illegal to a state where abortion is legal, we want to know about it, so we're requiring that you use a traceable method of payment," then the problem may become more obvious to you.
If instead the government says, "We're requiring that you use a traceable method of payment," but doesn't disclose a specific reason why, and later decides to use it to determine when females travel to states where abortion is legal, that's not as obvious a problem. At first.
In this case, it could be, "We're requiring that you use a form of payment that we can easily monitor when engaging in transactions over $X." After about 5 years or so of people getting used to that, they can move the threshold to something like $(X/2). Then after a few more years, make it mandatory for anything over $50 or $20.
You don't even have to move the threshold. Inflation will eventually take care of it. At the current rate of inflation in some EU countries it would only take 5-6 years for the value of money to be $(X/2).
That's a big claim. Can you put a guarantee on it? Seems like when your only option is to use a tightly regulated system that has opinions on how much you can spend, every time you do you are granted permission. Some day they may say no. What is your recourse when they do?
Maybe you do, but not all countries function as well as yours. I'm Greek, and I remember a few years ago when we could only withdraw 50 euros a day from ATMs.
You're on the happy path, and wondering why anyone would complain when the path is so happy. The problem is what happens when that breaks down, and when that happens you definitely want to be able to use cash.
Thank you. "the happy path" is the best way to put it I have heard in a while. I genuinely feel that people having that level of naivete is the result of them living in a fairly stable country for far too long.
Dear people who come up every time with their own version of "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear", break your bubble sometimes, talk to your work colleague from outside of America (or "the west"), ask them what it's like to live in a country where you cannot trust your own government. What it's like to live in a post-communist country, what it's like to live in a country with central planning.
Exactly, it's the same as "if you have nothing to hide". No, sometimes I need to hide things for legitimate reasons, and sometimes I want to buy weed and I should be allowed to.
There may be not many instances, but this is simply not an argument. That is irrelevant. People should be have the freedom to use cash.
We had instances where a government blocked bank accounts of protesters, in democracies and autocracies alike. This is unacceptable. No government in the world should be able to restrict what people can do with their own money. And with this EU-wide limit, we are one step closer to nothing else orwellian authoritarianism.
It's not just "grey economy" how you call it. It's part of an essential freedom that has been taken away from the people.
You're talking as if introducing a nationwide speed limit is equivalent to banning cars. The regulation of a given operation is not akin to outright banning it and to assert that is hyperbole.
Remember about 10 years ago when Cyprus started confiscating money held in bank accounts to settle debts and the people holding cash kept their money because it was physically in their possession and harder to confiscate?
Remember earlier this year when people in Lebanon had to hold bank managers at gun point to try and withdraw money from their own accounts as the economy collapsed?
The "CaSH hAZ nO PuRpOSe eXCePt fOR cRImE" people in this comment section have massive blind spots. I'm not surprised politicians are taking advantage of it.
Fortunately this will also make it more difficult for North Korea to employ compulsory labor of NK civilians in the EU, which is one of the principal contributing factors to the regime's continued ability to act as a source of instability in the SCS region. There is a 45 minute documentary by Deutsche Welle (DW) on YT that informs on the issue.
Anyway, as the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions, this one at least won't be one to benefit primarily the children. At least one hopes.
Not sure how thats an excuse to make these kinds of changes in europe - it seems like an attempt to being emotion into a topic that shouldnt be emotionally charged
It's one of London's six airports, primarily used for discount holiday flights. Hardly safety-critical.
Besides, this is literally the first time ever it has reached temperatures this high - and it has been open for 84 years. I bet they also "failed to design" for hurricanes, cataclysmic floods, and volcanoes!
As I understand you are engineering for a range of temperatures with problems to be found outside either end of the range (though I imagine it’s also possible to engineer for wider or narrower ranges to some extent, with appropriate cost implications).
Coping with higher maximum temperatures means more cracking and damage at very low temperatures, so it is not necessarily a case of just building in more buffer at the top end but a trade off between the cost and frequency of events like this and the cost of dealing with the effects of winter.
Given that this had literally never happened before and the frequency of similarly hot events was also lower in the past, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the trade-off landed where it did, even if it may well be in for a rethink now.
When these designs were made, 40 °C in the UK was a once-in-5,000-years event. Now, it seems to be about 1 in 30 years (we don't have enough data to be sure).
Also, the problem usually isn't the 40-degree air temperature itself, because that's usually in the operating range--it's the rails and machinery and confined spaces hitting 60+ that fucks everything up.
New York considered shutting down its subways in July 2011 when it was "only" 40.5. Why? Because the underground stations were hitting 50, which (esp. in New York humidity) is dangerous for the most heat-sensitive people.
I'm sorry, but that's a whackadoodle approach to engineering. 40C is well within the range of expected temperatures, and the men who designed it failed epically. There have been heatwaves in the UK since 1911 where the temp approaches 40C.
I doubt it's a once every few decades event anymore. It got to 38 in several places in the country a few years ago. It seems to get up to the mid 30s every year now.
The problem is these temperatures are quite a bit higher than ever previously recorded, and go beyond the reasonable scenarios for which they were built. I’m sure sure newer UK infra is designed for higher temperatures but this is new territory and unfortunately probably just a taste of what’s coming.
Worth also adding this wasn’t as bad as it sounds- only a small patch was faulty and fixed within a few hours. For bigger problems see the various wildfires and also widespread breakdowns in chilled food storages. I also hate to think how barn animals are faring.
> The problem is these temperatures are quite a bit higher than ever previously recorded, and go beyond the reasonable scenarios for which they were built.
Exactly. I remember talk in the press about the default asphalt composition for the roads where I am (Romania) being changed to handle higher temperatures like 15 years ago. We're a lot more to the south and got warmer faster than the UK.
Lawyers who want to get rich and earn a fat payday. The bill of rights states that her actions are outright illegal. It's an easy win for anyone who doesn't fear the Twitterati.
No. This is the hiring manager. They are not just one person. She represents the company Dropbox, and they will be judged for her actions as their ambassador.
