needa stop posting but keep finding random interesting shit

[pd Rydia]

www.bep.treas.gov/section.cfm/8/39
<ul>What is mutilated currency?

Currency notes which are:<ul>• NOT CLEARLY more than one-half of the original note and/or,
• in such condition that the value is questionable and special examination is required to determine its value. </ul>Currency can become mutilated in any number of ways. The most common causes are: fire, water, chemicals, explosives; animal, insect or rodent damage; and petrification or deterioration by burying. Under regulations issued by the Department of the Treasury, mutilated United States currency may be exchanged at face value if:<ul>• more than 50% of a note identifiable as United States currency is present; or,
• 50% or less of a note identifiable as United States currency is present, and the method of mutilation and supporting evidence demonstrates to the satisfaction of the Treasury that the missing portions have been totally destroyed.</ul>WHAT IS NOT MUTILATED CURRENCY?

Any badly soiled, dirty, defaced, disintegrated, limp, torn, worn, out currency note that is CLEARLY MORE than one-half of the original note, and does not require special examination to determine its value. These notes should be exchanged through your local bank and processed by the Federal Reserve Bank.

SHIPMENT OF MUTILATED CURRENCY

Mutilated currency may be mailed or personally delivered to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. When mutilated currency is submitted, a letter should be included stating the estimated value of the currency and an explanation of how the currency became mutilated. Each case is carefully examined by an experienced mutilated currency examiner. The amount of time needed to process each case varies with its complexity and the case workload of the examiner.

The Director of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing has the final authority for the settlement of mutilated currency claims.

Although Treasury examiners are usually able to determine the amount and value of mutilated currency, careful packaging is essential to prevent additional damage.

The following procedures should be applied when packing mutilated currency:

1. Regardless of the condition of the currency, Do Not Disturb the fragments any more than is absolutely necessary.

2. If the currency is brittle or inclined to fall apart, pack it carefully in plastic and cotton without disturbing the fragments and place the package in a secure container.

3. If the currency was mutilated in a purse, box, or other container, it should be left in the container to protect the fragments from further damage.

4. If it is absolutely necessary to remove the fragments from the container, send the container along with the currency and any other contents that may have currency fragments attached.

5. If the currency was flat when mutilated, do not roll or fold the notes.

6. If the currency was in a roll when mutilated, do not attempt to unroll or straighten it out.

7. If coin or any other metal is mixed with the currency, carefully remove it. Any fused, melted, or otherwise mutilated coins should be sent to the following address for evaluation:<ul>Superintendent
U. S. Mint
Post Office Box 400
Philadelphia, PA. 19105 </ul>For cases that are expected to take longer than 4 weeks to process, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing will issue a written confirmation of receipt.

MAILING ADDRESS
Department of the Treasury
Bureau of Engraving and Printing
Office of Currency Standards
P. O. Box 37048
Washington, D. C. 20013

All mutilated currency should be sent by "Registered Mail, Return Receipt Requested." Insuring the shipment is the responsibility of the sender.

Personal deliveries of mutilated currency to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing are accepted between the hours of 8:00 A.M. and 2:00 P.M., Monday through Friday, except holidays. The Office of Currency Standards is located at 14th and C Streets, S. W., Washington, D. C.

To obtain information about your mutilated currency shipment, please contact the Mutilated Currency Division at (202) 874-2595 or (202) 874-2141.</ul>
Soooo, what's the policy in other countries like? :0 <p>

---

<div style="text-align:center">"Pants are bad!!! We should wear pants only on our head you conformist bastard!!! Pants are the devils work!! Run freee!! And pantless!!!" -- Vulture</div>
</p>

[BrainWalker]

Rodents aren't animals? <p><div style="text-align:center"></div></p>

[pd Rydia]

You know that, and I know that, but some people get easily confused. <p>

---

<div style="text-align:center">"Pants are bad!!! We should wear pants only on our head you conformist bastard!!! Pants are the devils work!! Run freee!! And pantless!!!" -- Vulture</div>
</p>

[Uncle Pervy]

They're made of plastic, you know.

I wonder if they have a walk-in policy? <p>---------------------------

Your are not supposed to be reading this!</p>

[Justice Augustus]

I remember this. Someone threatened to call Consumer Rights (a group that makes sure us big bad sales assistants don't do anything nasty to the sweet innocent little customer) because I refused to take a five pound note that was in 4 pieces. I mean, I think about 90% of the note was still there...but godamn. In order to register it at the end of the day I had to tape it together.
<p>

---

"Moreover, when on the following night, much to his dismay, [Caesar] had a dream of raping his own mother, the soothsayers greatly encouraged him by their interpretations of it: namely, that he was destined to conquer the earth" - Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars - Julius Caesar, chapter 7</p>

[JasonAB17]

... See, at any of the Jobs I've ever worked, we'd just tell those people to fuck off. What excuse is there for your papered money to be in four pieces? <p><div style="text-align:center"></div></p>

[pd Rydia]

Gus's story is amusing. The meanie!

At the airport, we knew the 50% rule because it occurred with some frequency, and we had banks to go to for exchanging the money. I don't expect it to be so common at lower volume stores. As a consumer armed with the knowledge that a bill visibly more than 50% can be exchanged at a bank, I'd go to a bloody bank and exchange it--not make some poor kid at a Target or something do it and have them worry whether they'll have to pay it or wonder where the thing's been.


Also!

http://tafkac.org/misc/money_making.html

<ul><small>(MISC)</small>

"We receive mutilated currency of all kinds [...] buried, burned, torn, petrified, teargassed, chewed by animals and exposed to the secretions of decomposing bodies." A farmer once mailed in a cow's stomach; the examiners verified that it contained several hundred dollars. The examiners have pieced together money confetti sent in by a man who had hidden his savings in the barrel of a seldom-used shotgun. If they can patch together 51 percent of a bill, they redeem it. Fearful of destroying evidence that can back up their claims, citizens pull up to the loading dock downstairs with the burned contents of entire rooms-desks, filing cabinets and all.

[...] Possession of paper that even looks like currency paper is a federal crime. Genuine currency paper is one quarter linen and three-quarters cotton, with a few tiny red and blue fibers added to the mix to make imitation that much harder. Scraps and cuttings from clothing manufacturers are a key ingredient of Crane's recipe.

[...] Like all printshops, this one has its share of slipups. Harry recalls the time they printed $ 1 backs on $ 5 faces, but the error was caught before the sheets went out. "I can only wonder what the value of those $ 6 bills would have been," he says.

[...] The sheets that pass muster are cut down to size; then letterpresses add serial numbers, and Treasury and federal seals. The finished notes are bundled into 4,000-note "bricks" and shrink-wrapped in plastic, ready for shipping. "When we're printing $ 100 bills," says packaging expert Will Groomes, hefting a $ 40,000 brick of tens in one hand, "then we're talking about $ 400,000 right here." Several weeks a year, he says, the bureau prints $ 100 bills around the clock. At those times, a three-foot-high skid of bricks is worth $ 32 million, enough to found a university or two. "If you think of it as money," says Groomes, "you'll go crazy. So you have to think of this as a product, like shampoo."

As for spoilage, it is not, understandably, tossed into a dumpster in the parking lot. Its destination is a bunkerlike concrete room in the building's subbasement. There, I watch William Moore, a cheerful fellow in grimy work clothes, grab 32-note sheets by the fistful and heave them under a slowly turning drum covered with spikes. The sheets emerge on the other side of the drum in tatters and drop into an enormous well in the center of the room. The walls of the well slant inward to form a funnel down which Moore's security supervisor, Matthew Stevens, is stuffing pulverized currency with a 20-foot pole. Directly below the chute is a waste-fueled boller, and the room around us reverberates with the roar of its fire. [...] Moore laughs when I ask him if it makes him sad to be destroying all this money. It would make him sadder, he assures me, not to receive his paycheck.


<small>(WORN OUT MONEY AND COUNTERFEITS)</small>

The volume of spoiled currency the bureau destroys is small change compared with the amount of wornout bills that have to be done away with annually. If you made a neat stack of just the $ 1 bills that are destroyed each year, it would rise almost 200 miles. The task falls to the country's 12 Federal Reserve Banks. Each of them regulates the flow of cash in its region, accepting excess or worn-out bills from local banks and doling out notes fresh from Washington as needed. High-speed sorting machines shred any bill on the spot if it is too limp, too faded, too creased or generally too abused to be of further service. The sorters also detect counterfeits (by measuring the iron content of the ink, then examining the brightness of the bill along a particular strip). Evidence of a crime, counterfeits are not destroyed. Instead, they're sent to Secret Service headquarters in Washington, where two walls of filing cabinets hold four samples of every batch of counterfeit money ever seized. The inventory is growing rapidly.

"Most counterfeiters take a picture of a genuine bill, then make an offset plate from the negative," says Special Agent Pete Smoot [...] searching out his favorites among the 13,000 varieties on hand. He hands me a good-looking twenty, sharp and crinkly. The cross-hatching around Andrew jackson's head is as clear as a window screen. On both sides of the bill, tiny red and blue fibers have simply been printed right on the paper, a little trick that took somebody four separate pressruns. "Some counterfeiters draw them in," says Smoot, "and I've seen bills where the counterfeiters had cut real pieces of thread and tried to glue them on."

Though best known for protecting Presidents, the U.S. Secret Service first set up shop in 1865 specifically to combat counterfeiting. At the time, between one third and one-half of all paper money in circulation was thought to be phony. That proportion has dropped considerably, but seizures are up none the less way up. Thanks largely to better cameras and better presses, counterfeiting is a growth industry.

[...] Smoot opens a file drawer at random and produces a sorry-looking twenty, just a photocopy on cheap paper. "Stuff like this gets passed all the time," he says. From the Reno office, where he worked until recently, he investigated a case where photocopies of $ 1 bills were turning up in a dollar-changing machine at a Carson City video arcade. Adjoining the arcade was a copy center. "It turned out a whole gang of little kids were making copies of dollar bills, walking over and putting the copies in the dollar changer, then buying soda and arcade games with the change," says Smoot. A good change machine wouldn't be fooled, he says, but arcades and laundromats often can't afford good change machines. Slot-machine slugs were another low-tech caper that used to keep Smoot busy in Nevada. "We'd catch these guys out in the sagebrush with their Coleman stoves, melting down lead and pouring it into handmade molds for Eisenhower dollars," he says. Ike may not have looked too lifelike, but the slot machines didn't care.

The most exquisite counterfeit money Smoot and his fellow agents ever saw came from an artisan in Thailand named Lee Ah Sin, aka King Kong, and from a solo artist in Southern California, Marion Williams. Both men used the time-consuming intaglio method of printing. King Kong, the protege of a Hong Kong master known as Professor Wong, is thought to have passed at least $ 2.5 million of homemade money before his arrest in 1985.

Marion Williams' tabletop operation was far humbler, producing perhaps $ 15,000 a year. At the time of his arrest in 1974, Williams-or Marion. as Smoot and his colleagues fondly refer to him-was a 77-year-old recluse suffering from cataracts, hernias and alcoholism. "What finally did him in," says Smoot, "is that he took in a boarder who got curious about a locked room in the house. The boarder broke his way in, found all this money and took some that Marion would never have passed-it probably hadn't passed his quality control." The boarder was nabbed right away and promptly squealed on his landlord. Williams' apparatus now rests in a display case with the Counterfeit Division on the seventh floor of Secret Service headquarters. In it are an old box camera, a container of Rit shoe dye, a bottle of jack Daniels ("To keep him going," says an agent) and a beautiful $ 20 bill. Williams' technique was arduous but clever. He would build up photographic emulsions on a small plate of glass until the pattern was almost as deeply etched as a steel engraving. Then, using the shoe dye as ink, he would squeeze glass and paper through an old, handcranked laundry wringer, one note at a time.


<small>(COINS)</small>

The Secret Service investigates coin swindles as well. In the agency's spotless forensic laboratory, technical analyst jim Brown hands me an 1879 Morgan silver dollar. On its face are two tiny raised letters, CC," for Carson City. Without that mint mark," says Brown, the coin is worth about $ 17. With the CC, the coin's worth $ 2,500." He pops the silver dollar into the vacuum chamber of a scanning electron microscope on a desktop in front of us. Two luminous, green Cs appear on the machine's video screen. Magnified 20 times, they seem like perfectly innocent, flattop mounds. Brown ups the magnification to 200. "Look at that," he says. "You already know something's rotten in Denmark." The raised letters now resemble pancakes on a plate: a deep, dark crack runs around the base of the letters. Brown boosts the magnification to 500 and the pancakes appear to be levitating clear off the plate. Some ne'er-do-well, he suggests, managed to file the mint mark off a less valuable Carson City dollar and affix it to this one. Quite a scam, I say. "There's a million of them," says Pete Smoot.

As the Carson City coin caper illustrates, a numismatically inclined criminal can make just as much money from altered coins as from homemade bills. For this reason, security at the government's two factories for general-circulation coins, the Philadelphia Mint and the Denver Mint, is as tight as if they were stamping out gold doubloons, not pocket money. When I visit the Philadelphia Mint, a police officer asks me to set aside not only all my change but also my shoes, my glasses and my wallet before passing through a metal detector. The device is so sensitive that shoelace eyelets, screws in eyeglass temples and magnetic strips on credit cards will all set it off.

[...] The factory produces 35 million coins a day. Threefourths of them are pennies. Doing away with all this penny making altogether might seem like a sensible way to save the federal government some money. Mint spokeswoman Eleanor McElvey points out, however, that pennies retail for one cent but cost the mint only six-tenths of a cent to make. The 50-cent piece, the highest-denomination coin the mint makes, costs a nickel to produce. "We come out ahead with every piece we make," McElvey says. The mint's total return, she notes, which includes income from commemorative coins, proof sets and other collectibles, amounts to several hundred million dollars a year.

A cramped corner studio on an upper floor is the workspace of the mint's sculptor-engravers. American citizens are notoriously resistant to new designs for money, as sponsors of the $ 2 bill and the Susan B. Anthony dollar quickly learned, so the sculptor engravers spend most of their time on commemorative and presentational medals. I notice an exception on a tabletop in one corner, a plaster bas-relief of George Washington the size of a dinner plate. Taped to the top is a handwritten sign: FRAGILE' "This is the original model for the 1932 quarter," says Edgar Steever, 76, one of several old-timers in the shop. The plaster model is rolled out every year for a date change, he explains. The final 8" in 1988" has just been scraped off, and a carefully fashioned clay 9" stuck in its place. A series of molds will be taken from this original to yield the new year's working dies.

A more unusual mint heirloom is Peter, a stuffed bald eagle that overlooks the mint's lobby from a Plexiglas case. According to mint lore, Peter was a domesticated eagle that nested in the mint in the early 1800s, occasionally posing for new coins. He met his end when he caught a wing in a huge coining-press flywheel. By some accounts, Peter continued to pose for coins after his visit to the taxidermist.

The only person still living to have sculpted an entire general-circulation U.S. coin, eagle and all, is Frank Gasparro, who retired as chief engraver of the mint in 1981. A short, animated 79-year-old with emphatic eyebrows, a crumpled necktie and a jimmy Durante profile, Gasparro still does medallion work in an immaculate private studio a mile away from the Philadelphia Mint. He designed the Eisenhower and Anthony dollars, and he engraved the "tails" sides of both the 1959 penny and the 1964 Kennedy half dollar. He also designed a two-cent piece for the mint in the late 1970s -- "It was smaller than a penny, larger than a dime, with just a big 2' on it," he says -- but the Treasury Department dropped the idea.

Gasparro is an excitable man and nothing seems to thrill him more than the subject of coin making. As a 12-year-old apprentice sculptor, he saw a medallion being sculpted and found the experience more exciting than a baseball game." When getting change, he has been known to show cashiers the back of a penny and announce he designed it. "They'd look at me like I was crazy, so I don't do it anymore," he says. I ask Gasparro if he signed his work. "Sure, I'll show you." He fishes around in his pocket and pulls out a penny. "Here's my FG' right here," he says, pointing to the bottom right corner of the Lincoln Memorial. It occurs to me that few other artists in the country could show me objects from their oeuvre by reaching into a pocket or a guest's pocket, for that matter.

Gasparro is well aware that most people think of coins (when they think about them at all) as tokens of exchange, not portable sculptures. I ask him if he thinks the penny will ever be abolished. "No way. There's a psychology to it. The 99-cent sale -- people want that penny back!" Do you? I ask. "Sure I do!" Moreover, he says, he always keeps an eye out for pennies when he walks down the street. "I do it for sentimental reasons," he says, laughing. "I find more pennies than anybody."</ul> <p>

---

<div style="text-align:center">"Pants are bad!!! We should wear pants only on our head you conformist bastard!!! Pants are the devils work!! Run freee!! And pantless!!!" -- Vulture</div>
</p>

[BrainWalker]

Currency is just a nother way for those in power to subjugate the sheep. Children are taught that their lives should follow the path of "get an education so you can get a job and make lots of money!" But does that lead to happiness? Men and women sell their lives and their souls to the corporate machine, and in return they are handed numbers. Not even tangible legal tender these days, just numbers in a computer database that equate to how much better your American dream is than your neighbor's. Deplorable, really. <p><div style="text-align:center"></div></p>

[Idran1701]

lol wat <p>

---

"Never let your morals get in the way of doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
</p>

[PriamNevhausten]

too long, didn't read

also: Smoot. Smoot smoot smoot. <p><span style="font-size:xx-small;">"It's in the air, in the headlines in the newspapers, in the blurry images on television. It is a secret you have yet to grasp, although the first syllable has been spoken in a dream you cannot quite recall." --Unknown Armies</span></p>

[Mechanisto]

Quote:

---

Currency is just a nother way for those in power to subjugate the sheep. Children are taught that their lives should follow the path of "get an education so you can get a job and make lots of money!" But does that lead to happiness? Men and women sell their lives and their souls to the corporate machine, and in return they are handed numbers. Not even tangible legal tender these days, just numbers in a computer database that equate to how much better your American dream is than your neighbor's. Deplorable, really.

---

BWAHAHA!

Of *course* it's a tool to control the masses. Otherwise, we'd have a lot of out-of-control mases.

Besides; obsessions over material wealth are hardly limited to currency. It is the desire for quickly achieved and externally defined happiness that is at fault here.

Ahh... I don't remember the last time I've been baited. Refreshing indeed! <p>---
My head moves around inside the bag, it's not like I'm drinking through my actual eye socket.</p>

[Idran1701]

...Plus, that was a post left over from the April Fools-ing. Thus, you know, me speaking in horrible horrible internet slang without being utterly ripped apart through mocking. :( <p>

---

"Never let your morals get in the way of doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
</p>Edited by: [url=http://p068.ezboard.com/brpgww60462.showUserPublicProfile?gid=idran1701>Idran1701</A] at: 4/7/05 15:43

[Mechanisto]

On a more recent note, I am a spoon. <p>---
My head moves around inside the bag, it's not like I'm drinking through my actual eye socket.</p>