About 20 years ago there was a gang that made fake Brazilian R$1 coins (they must have been worth 50 US cents then, I don't recall precisely). And I have collected a couple of very shady R$0,50 coins that I'm pretty sure are fake. I collect commemorative coins so I always check my change carefully.
I don't think the materials are expensive, but the electricity required might be. So my guess is that this might make sense if someone steals the power. One guy was busted stealing electricity to mine bitcoin a few years ago.
This was pretty common with £1 coins until they moved to bimetallic coinage. The fakes would be rejected by vending machines.
The biggest tells were poor reeding quality and slightly soft detailing. On very low quality fakes, the face and obverse weren't aligned, though I never encountered one of these in the wild.
Back in the 2000s/10s I had a little jar of various £1 and a couple 50p I was certain were fake. Interestingly the fake £1 I got most frequently were -from- vending machines - I wonder if those refilling them slipped them in?
Sadly not sure where they are now, they were also mixed in with a good few £5 coins I bought, I used to love paying for things with a £5 coin. Hope I find them again!
> I wonder if those refilling them slipped them in?
I recall reading that they were smuggled into the country by organized crime. They'd then sell them for around 60p on the pound to coin heavy businesses (esp. laundry and vending.)
Really? Man that's a shame, you used to be able to 'buy' them at the post office for £5 - so I'd get at least £50worth a month and spend them around east London, I seemed to find it hilarious at the time - but after a quick chat I don't remember anyone refusing them anywhere.
I just love those documentaries where he starts off in Europe following some bird and ends up on a rock in the middle of the ocean. And he's been at it since when the world was much bigger. What a life!
Absolutely. Look at the Portuguese Empire: even at the end most Portuguese were poor and many had to emigrate.
Most British had a low standard of living going into the XX century. Engels' report to Parliament painted a bleak picture of the standard of living in Britain at the peak of the British Empire.
Man, Access could've been so good if they just made an app around SQLite. Or since it's Microsoft and they need to do everything their own way, it would've been so good if they made a flat file DB à la SQLite, but with T-SQL (or a subset thereof) instead of JET-SQL.
Increase interoperability. Funnel data people from Excel into real DB technologies.
And if they did more to blur the lines between spreadsheets and databases, and make it seamless to work out of both Excel and Access, add more spreadsheet features to the data views, etc.
I had a little crisis at 12 when I went from BASIC to Pascal: how was that supposed to work without line numbers? The statements were just floating around without structure!
More code means more support and more maintenance. If your team is already overloaded or if it's going to be reduced because of AI, things are going to get tough.
My bigger concern is actually that, if a company isn't careful, the bloat (complexity, amount of code, other artifacts etc.) will just balloon and largely cancel out any gains.
Feedback is often only considered once something is already on fire (financially, functionally, or literally).
That’s the game plan for the AI companies: once companies have massive codebases of critical AI generated code and a skeleton crew of prompt engineers they’re going to be locked in to the AI product to develop anything new.
They’re not even selling shovels, they’re selling subscriptions for shovels.
I don't think there needs to be any intentional evil scheme for this dynamic to be worth considering and mitigating.
For example, there's also no cabal behind memory prices dropping (ignoring the development of the past months, of course), which in turn enabled web and game developers to use more memory and make their software non-viable on older devices.
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