Court rules paper money unfair to blind

Source: AP




Read more: http://money.cnn.com/2008/05/20/news/blind_money.ap/index.htm?cnn=yes

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Euro Bills are printed in different sizes and colors and have sensory markings to make them easier to distinguish

Like they are beating a "Rented Mule"

bring back Gold Coins!

Never thought of that :-) :-)

the Bush Crime Family is working hard to make sure that no one -- including the blind -- actually have any paper money. Problem solved.

Why not, braille is on all the ATM buttons - even the drive-thrus.

That's an interesting problem you've brought up there.

In my opinion, the logical answer is an expanded system of coinage, with $1, $5, $10, and $20 coins in common circulation.

..depending on denomination.

But, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUH!

it would be similarly not-hard to soak, flatten, and do new false dots.

Laminating them in, as with the metal thread, would be far harder to disable, though probably still not impossible (I think the threads are laid into the pulp on the fourdrinier screen, not actually laminated by sandwiching)

Punching a special code (not Braille) as holes in the bill might work too. I suspect it wouldn't be possible to fill in and replace the holes in a way undetectable by touch. Or at least not for any price that would make it worthwhile to a petty crook.

but i did notice that the drive-thru atms at my bank do NOT have braille on the keypads.

as far as braille on money is concerned- i wonder how long it would be before someone started altering it to rip-off blind people...? i.e.- change the marking so that a $1 bill seems to be a $100...:shrug:

It would make more sense to use a code that can only be altered to reduce the value.

bumps on paper money could be sanded down, and an embossing-type machine could be used to make new raised markings.

With the lower-denomination bills smaller and large-denomination bills bigger, then there would be no realistic way of adding length to a 5-dollar bill to make it a 20 or 50.


Or perhaps certain edges could be scalloped or otherwise bordered in a unique pattern and/or location. If a $1 was entirely scalloped and a $100 had only one section scalloped, then it would impossible to turn a single into a C-note.

The best that can probably be done is to make it hard for casual criminals - the kind who'd think it a big score to pass off a one as a ten.

So lay a certain thread pattern in every denomination such that changing the value require more alterations than the effort is worth. Because of course each alteration has to pass the touch test on both sides of the paper, since they represent local variations in thickness.

Lets say we just use binary, with 0 being a narrow stripe and a 1 being a stripe distinctively, let's say 4x, wider, and the interstripe distance a constant so that the overall size of the pattern sometimes changes too.

So here are the patterns for the bills in common use today:

0000001
0000101
0001010
0010100
0110010
1100100

Any change requires multiple alterations.

edit to make it more visually obvious:

X X X X X X XXXX
X X X X XXXX X XXXX
X X X XXXX X XXXX X
X X XXXX X XXXX X X
X XXXX XXXX X X XXXX X
XXXX XXXX X X XXXX X X

OK Mr. Smarty Pants, what's another word for 'thesaurus?'

That's so if I'm driving a blind friend (or if a blind person is in a a taxi) the driver can take them to the ATM for money, and the blind person can get their money themselves without giving their pin number out.

We hired a number of blind vendors to run our snack shops, and then the soldiers/civilians (mainly civilians there) were ripping them off by passing off the wrong bills.

"Relying on store clerks for help" isn't a solution if you ARE the store clerk, and the only employee in the shop.

Call me cruel, but a blind shopkeeper has SNL skit written all over it.

in public buildings to people without sight. I say "or had" since the predators have probably eliminated those reservations on the same grounds as affirmative action has been eliminated: can't go against God's judgement that the poor and handicapped are unworthy.

Isn't a large population of blind vendors kind of statistically unlikely?

They had small concessions in the hallways of buildings that were primarily filled with folks who had security clearances. The amount they lost through being ripped off wasn't huge, but it was pretty sad it was ever an issue - they were people we all knew by first name.

I'll bet there are a hundred different handicaps that would have worked fine in that situation...but some twit picked BLIND?

with the monopoly money the elite keeps printing. Our salaries are becoming worthless. Need to fund a war? Need to outsource?
Just print some more toilet paper.

This one really is a no-brainer. I can't believe that it's taken this long. What the hell is wrong with the government? Will every person at every place in the chain fight tooth and nail against doing the right thing? Different sized bills: not hard to do. They ought to get rid of $1 bills while they're at it, maybe $5 as well.

Bill acceptors would have to be redesigned to accommodate smaller-sized bills, and there are millions of bill acceptors that would need to be retrofitted or changed.

I originally thought of cash drawers, but as long as they leave the $100 the size it is now and go down from there, cash drawers would be okay. You can put a smaller bill in a drawer, but not a larger one.

Cutting the sheets of money wouldn't be that bad. Right now the cutters have a "currency" program, a "bond" program and so on. You'd have to have a different channel in the cutter's memory for each size of money, which might mean reprogramming the cutter every time you changed denominations. (ESPECIALLY if they use those old funky Polars that have one programming channel.)

And while they're at it, they need to finally get around to releasing the $3 bill. You know how the quarters have different backs on them? The $3 would have different presidents on it--Nixon, Reagan, Shrub if he ever attends a military funeral...

While the ruling does seem to stroke our sense of fair play, jmowreader has posited some very real, practical, logistical problems with implementing such a ruling.

Seems like the court would have thought about that as well.

Every vending machine sold in America today has a bill acceptor on it, all ATMs have bill handlers, all self checkouts have them...not to mention coin changers and video poker machines. Throw all those people together--NONE of whom want to spend a hundreds of dollars buying a new bill acceptor for every machine they own--and you've got a very powerful lobbying force.

Someone mentioned Braille. I know that wouldn't work. Money gets folded up, rubbed against itself, crumpled...which would flatten out the Braille bumps and defeat the purpose.

I remember them talking about this problem when I was in school--I graduated in 1981. Back then, nothing except some old gas pumps had bill acceptors on them, so this change would have been fairly painless. Now? There's no damn way.

"Old Europe" values?

then yes, it was an Old Europe value.

I was looking around on line and noticed a suggestion that plastic strips be embedded in the bills in different places. This is doable, it would make the money more usable by the blind, and it wouldn't change the dimensions of the currency.

As for the things that don't involve the government directly, those people can deal with capitalism if they want to participate in it. Maybe now would be time to invest in a US company that manufactures bill readers. The UK has done this with no problems what-so-ever, and all Euro zones seem to have been able to make the shift rather quickly. It should be much easier here. I shudder to think that the country that I grew up in, that supposedly imbued a sense of fairness and equality in it's citizens, would shun doing what is right, because "it's too hard - whhaaaa". Regarding the cost of changing bill cutters... give me a break. How much is spent on this war every day? How much is spent making pennies that are worth less than the materials that go into them? I would like to be proud of my country again, at least for one fleeting moment.

Anyone in the printing business can remember the moran who runs the cutter (a job for someone with high strength and low brain--it is THE most monotonous job in America) plugging in the wrong program and cutting something really expensive wrong. One of those big cutters can cut a thousand sheets of paper in one stroke. If there are 16 bills on each sheet, each sheet costs two dollars to print and it's serialized (serials can never be reused, ever)...and the dumbshit cuts it wrong, you've lost quite a bit.

Please don't compare the Euro-using countries to the US...in Europe, different-sized bills have been used for a long time.

Bullshit. If we can't compare the US to Europe, we've already decided to be a second class country. It wasn't that way 20 years ago. How about we just roll over completely? Why have any tariffs at all? Why not just let the rest of the world run rough shod over us? We might as well if we're prepared to be worthless pieces of shit in this one very simple regard that some much of the rest of the world has been able to sort out.

I have known cutter operators who can't speak English and were running a cutter unsupervised--and fucking jobs up royally--the day after they first saw a cutter. European printing-plant employees go through a seven-year apprenticeship.

But we've completely gotten off my main point, which is that the United States' currency-handling system is based on all the money being exactly the same size--and it's been exactly the same size since it was first created. If you go outside the United States to where the bills come in different sizes, you'll notice that it's been that way for decades. If you went to Germany, say, and tried to implement different-size Euro notes when all the Deutschemark notes were uniformly sized, the Euro as it now stands would have never come to fruition--because now you're asking these folks to make two significant changes rather than one.

Let's use Self Checkout systems as an example. Their cash handlers are very complex, having both bill acceptors and bill disbursers. I'm going to take a wild stab and say that subsystem costs $2500--and it won't work with variable-size bills the way it stands. You need to either rebuild or replace that system. If it costs $2500 to rebuild it to take variable-size bills, multiplied by four units per store, by four thousand Wal-Marts that have these machines...does anyone think Wal-Mart, the world's cheapest bastards, would accept the government telling them, "you have to pay forty million dollars, right now, if you want to be able to transact business in cash off your self checkouts"? Oh fuck no, man; you know they won't go for it, and Wal-Mart owns enough congressmen to get this stomped in a heartbeat. (And we're not even up to all the OTHER big boxes, the laundromats who can't afford to buy new change machines, Harold Smith in Tukwila, Washington, whose vending machine business is going to close because he can't afford to replace 600 bill acceptors...)

This will never come to pass. I'm sorry. It's a good idea that's thirty years too late.

You're probably correct though- 30 years too late....

why not crawl inside a whisky bottle and stay there?

The question is, will it be in the next few years, or decades from after the US is a third world country that is in desperate need of modernization to be at the level that first world countries are at in our current decade.

I have never worked in a printing plant, but I don't think that matters. Do you have any blind friends or family members? That's what this is all about, but you seem to think a valid argument against discriminating against the disabled is "whaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!! It's too hard!!!!". How about wheel chair ramps? Handicapped parking spaces? Making this OSHA complient? All of that shit costs money, but businesses having to fucking deal with it, because it's the law, as it damn well should be.

It would make organizing the money by value a little easier, and it would be less likely that people will be successful in attempting to confuse us by repeatedly asking to make change for various large value bills, repeatedly.

Just looking at the Euro bills make me envious.

With all of the repeated changes, one would think that a minor accommodation, like sizing bills according to their denominations could have been incorporated into the new designs.

I guess that's too much to expect from a country that stubbornly clings to an archaic system of weights and measures.

Something has me suspicious that there's a subplot behind this!...

Here (Britain), currency notes are redesigned about every eight years to include new anti-forgery measures. For instance, the last redesign put Charles Darwin (the people pictured are always great Britons) on the twenty pound note because his voluminous beard made it hard to copy. I always wondered why the US didn't do the same.

I lived in Australia for a year and all their bills were different sizes. All the vending machines can be retooled. They wear out quickly anyway.

can get their hands on money.

Actually I'm surprised anyone but a disaster/war contractor, or mortgage firm can get a hold of that stuff.

instead, besides imagine all the trees that could be saved not to mention coins last far longer dont they?