Faces on Euro banknotes are a terrible idea. Even internationally well-known personalities are associated with certain countries, and you do not put things that represent specific countries on banknotes used in different countries.
The EU isn't a federation, and having a single currency doesn't make the eurozone any more so.
The buildings aren't as bad, being european insitution headquarters. However, as they aren't necessarily widely recognizable, they come out a bit self serving.
It's not about protesting, it's about representation. They were born into what are now, Germany, Germany, Italy, USA, Germany, Polish.
Why not any of the below ?
Austria: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Belgium: Georges Lemaître
Bulgaria: Saint Cyril
Croatia: Nikola Tesla
Cyprus: Zeno of Citium
Czechia: Franz Kafka
Denmark: Hans Christian Andersen
Estonia: Jaan Kross
Finland: Jean Sibelius
France: Napoleon Bonaparte
Greece: Aristotle
Hungary: Franz Liszt
Ireland: James Joyce
Latvia: Mark Rothko
Lithuania: Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis
Luxembourg: Robert Schuman
Malta: Jean de Valette
Netherlands: Rembrandt van Rijn
Portugal: Vasco da Gama
Romania: Nadia Comăneci
Slovakia: Andy Warhol
Slovenia: Slavoj Žižek
Spain: Pablo Picasso
Sweden: Alfred Nobel
Why was Callas chosen over Joyce ? why was Beethovan chosen over Mozart ?
Beethoven in particular is easy. The EU doesn't have a national anthem, or a national flag, because it insists it isn't a nation, but Europe does have an anthem and a flag and of course the EU represents Europe, so it uses those, that's Europe's flag on the money. Europe's anthem is basically the bit you know from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
Officially the EU prefers Karajan's arrangement, if you're a huge classical music fan you'll recognise this immediately, but for most people it's just obviously the Ninth.
Marcus Rotkowitz was Jewish, born in Dvinsk, Russian Empire (today Daugavpils in Latvia) and emigrated when he was 10 (and Latvia wasn't a country yet.) At home, he spoke Yiddish and Russian, and probably didn't know a word in Latvian (at the time, Dvinsk population was half Jewish, with the rest divided between Russians, Poles, and Latvians).
Your idea that he's the guy who should represent Latvia on a European banknote would probably quickly get you burned at the stake at Doms Square in Riga.
Of course not, but people may complain that none of them are from their country. Maybe someone from Spain would like to see Picasso or some other famous Spanish figure in there. That's the reason for using generic images, the EU and the Eurozone in particular is a trade alliance of countries with different cultures.
I like what they did with coins the best, where one face is common, showing a map of Europe, and the other is free for the issuing country to choose from. I like the message it delivers, different cultures, united. And as people travel, they will bring coins from their countries, the resulting effect is that if you go to a Eurozone country, you are likely to see coins in circulation from all over Europe, which is a concrete example of free trade happening.
I wish they did the same for banknotes: one side generic, one side country-specific, but it may be impractical.
The reason not to do this with banknotes is that they wouldn't be accepted. "No weird money".
I happen to live in a city on England's south coast. So Scotland is quite far away and understandably Scottish banknotes, though legally equivalent to the notes you'd get here in most senses, are rarely seen. I know what they're supposed to look like and that they're 1:1 equivalent, but of course the guy who runs the Chinese takeaway near me wouldn't have seen one before. So what happens when a Glaswegian down for the weekend wants to order some food and tries to pay with the Scottish £10 in his wallet? The owner doesn't accept it. "No, no, no!". The Glaswegian insists it's legal tender [which is irrelevant, but if you don't know why it's irrelevant feel free to go look it up, it's not helpful for me to tell him this even if he believes me and I see no reason I need to explain to you either] and of course all the time they're arguing about money I am not getting my food.
So I took the man's Scottish £10 and handed the restaurant owner an English £10 because I don't care and now I can order food. Weird money is bad.
If you live in a border town you'd see notes from both sides. If you work in a tourist-facing industry you might recognise most of the variants because tourists tend to have their country's notes. But if you're some small town shopkeeper in Poland why would you know that this is real €200 note from Luxemboug? It's probably a fake, isn't it? So you make friction for these notes higher (some shopkeepers won't accept them) and even if legally they're fine you can't fix that friction in practice so people hate this outcome.
It's not a matter of protesting (nor is it a matter of nationalism).
It's a matter of bureocrats remembering that there are more countries in the eurozone than banknotes, and even if that wasn't the case, their denominations can be read as hierarchy.
Your issue is that people in Spain look at their note and think “da Vinci isn’t us, he’s them”.
Their idea is that they want people all over the EU to think of da Vinci as “us”. Over time, it’ll become more normal to consider luminaries from other European countries as part of the shared heritage.
That said there will be countries that may ask why their guy can’t make it to the note. Why not Herge, the Belgians might ask? The question is left as an exercise to the reader.
Your last question is something to consider in the current context of rising nationalism, which is all about the perception of being left out (even in the larger countries, where that perception is about each other).
Okay but would people in Spain really have an issue with da Vinci? isn't he cool af to everyone? isn't the Italian renaissance shared European history?
> Faces on Euro banknotes are a terrible idea. Even internationally well-known personalities are associated with certain countries
Why do you believe that? That sounds overly nationalistic to me. In the Schengen zone you can live and work in any country. Europe even accepts a lot of undocumented people from outside Europe, willingly. The whole European project seems to be about breaking down national borders in a pro-human way. Why take humans out of it?
You're free to read it as nationalism if you like, although I 'm very far from being nationalist, and I'd prefer if my paper money didn't provide fuel for nationalism.
The European project has worked all these years because it stands on the idea that we are all europeans with shared values, but also different countries with our own cultures. We are all the same yet different. The Euro banknotes (even though the Euro and the EU aren't the same thing) should represent that, not look like some specific nation's currency, which is what faces (any face no matter the personality) evokes.
PS: Perhaps paradoxically, the faces on Euro coins are a good idea (I like having my wallet populated with coins from different countries), for the same reason they're a bad idea on notes.
I think that actually these specific people would be a great choice for the Euro banknotes, because they are inspiring across borders. None of them are "national heroes". In Germany, we like Beethoven not because he was an exemplary German, but because he wrote bangers. In Germany, we look up to Marie Curie, because she won two Nobel prizes for cool research, no matter her nationalities! And they both migrated between European countries, like exemplary Europeans.
Yes Germany is so progressive that explains the AFD.
Look nobody in the Netherlands believes we share values with other countries the EU is just a good deal. The moment that stops and its auf Wiedersehen.
I sort of disagree, the faces SHOULD foster a unified identification as European. And at least on paper they do kind of nicely, imho. No one can argue with Da Vinci. Curie is Polish-French. Callas is internationally beloved and Greek. Beethoven is potentially the second-best known world-wide behind Da Vinci, and can be claimed by the whole German-speaking area, at least Germany and Austria. Cervantes is perhaps more obscure as a face, but well-deserved and everyone knows “quixotic”. Von Suttner is the most obscure and probably overrepresents the German-speaking countries, but it’s Europe, so the pacifist angle is hard to argue against.
Everyone can think of similarly deserving people. They should do it like the coins and just have an abundance of motifs from every country. Since they’re too scared to put english text on them, put a QR code link to some short text in every language. I cringe at the idea of QR codes in general, but what are you going to do.
The buildings are all the same steel and glass bullshit and represent nothing if not the widely despised bureaucratic aspects of the EU. The birds at least look nice, but they’re boring and hyper-harmless.
I'm europeist (but no longer a federationist after the cooperation debacle that was the eurocrisis) and I have no issue with the choice of personalities.
I do have an issue with anything that might be interpreted as the proposals of some countries having had more weight that others.
There's a reason why the current Euro banknotes represent bridges that do not exist in the real world.
> Beethoven is potentially the second-best known world-wide behind Da Vinci
You mean Europeans? Because I highly doubt more ppl know about them than about Jesus. And I'd claim the most well known European is probably Hitler, through infamy.
I mean of the proposed designs. Actually, why not have Hitler. I wouldn’t mind a “never again” series with infamous faces from every country. Could be fun, lol.
Is it too much to ask to consider that the people on the banknotes are/will be depicted because they are European, and not because they come from any member State in particular?
I personally consider these people European more than their specific nationality, but more importantly they to me represent European humanities, science, and so on.
You know what, I have seen many hypothetical criticisms like this, but not a single complaint from someone whose country would "not be represented". Maybe this just isn't a problem? Like I'm from Germany, and I would be completely fine if they had picked only people from e.g. eastern Europe, if they were cool enough!
I feel like this comment section is all about people searching for a reason to get offended.
How dare you to use a face! How dare you to use a building! How dare they use something some country specific! And even worst, generic! Oh no, a building of an institution!
No matter what is in, people looking to twist it in offense will find a reason.
Faces and buildings objectively make for ugly currency. Birds are somewhat okay, they disregard borders. I would have preferred more varied fauna or flora.
Just take a look at Maldive's currency and tell me that this proposal isn't terribly boring.
Cloudflare sees over 40%, and it hasn't gone up in the last year even with the overall traffic increase. Personally, as the APNIC article also says about their own observations, I guess the overall adoption is somewhere in between.
But we have to remember that this reflects the adoption on the client side. With many high profile services still IPv4-only, the fraction of IPv6 flowing on the public Internet might be much lower.
I wonder what incentives are needed to push this forward, because it's not the same incentives as years ago for sure. We've long since exhausted new IPv4 allocations.
If we're looking at the portion of traffic, most of the big bandwidth heavy services (the video streaming sites and CDNs) are on IPv6, the long tail of IPv4-only services tend to be lower bandwidth stuff.
I believe one big anti-incentive is rate limiting, especially nowadays. With IPv4 getting a range ban is somewhat effective, way less effective on ipv6 (theres a reason HE tunnelbroker is marked bad nowadays, discord bots doing music load balance over ips on tunnelbroker for pulling youtube audio data.. they ban a /64 but you balance over a /48 or bigger). I believe this was the main reason Discord disabled IPv6 (not sure if thats still the case, but it was back in the day since bans and api rate limiting was ip based).
It's difficult for servers to know how big client allocations are. With v4, pretty much everybody got /32s, but with v6, sizes vary. So you've got to start with small bans, and then switch to big bans later, but not too aggressively so you don't accidentally ban legitimate customers. It's a tricky balance.
You have to do that with range bans in v4 too, since you have no idea how big the pool of addresses a user can pull from is -- and with CGNAT in the picture you're kind of doomed to banning legitimate customers on v4 no matter what you do.
Yes, you ban some legitimate customers with v4. But the span between the smallest allocations and biggest allocations is much smaller, so simple strategies (like banning the bad address) scale further.
I think the span would be about the same, or smaller even, if you limited yourself to a granularity of 4 bits for v6. Allocations are often rounded to 4 bits in v6 because it correlates to exactly one character of the v6 address.
I'd also like to note that being worried about accidental overbanning in v6 but then being dismissive of it in v4 is a double standard.
UX issue, and UX issues are often downplayed by engineers, leading to adoption failures.
Another such example is SELinux, which would have prevented so many vulnerabilities from being exploited, but whose poor UX also caused everyone to disable it at install time.
SELinux's UX was significantly improved many years later, but already too late to change ingrained opinions. There are a lot of ingrained opinions about IPv6 too.
Conversely it means people who have ISPs that do IPv6 just have IPv6 and don't need to turn it off. Because it just works. The other day my IPv4 was down and I didn't even notice.
Most of what people see as "SELinux" is actually the default policy, which started out as way too strict. Then SELinux-enabled distros such as Red Hat moved to a policy that only applies to system services, and leaves user-launched binaries as if SELinux was disabled.
And even for system services, you can disable SELinux for one service (permissive mode) and leave it enabled for the rest.
This has been the case for more than 10 years, but the damage was done. It's now very hard for users even considering learning the basics (which are not hard).
There are maybe many buggy routers still out there that reset the IPv6 flow label field when they shouldn't, breaking hash-based load-balancers (the symptom is TCP connections spontaneously reset).
IIRC, a workaround was to prevent Linux from setting this field, or force-reset it on every outbound packet using netfilter.
Nothing to worry about. They don't need to learn anything anyway. Anything they would do in the future will be done by agentic AI, and generative AI will produce all the content they could possibly consume. They will be free to spend all day on their phones.
Perhaps it's important to point out that socialism != communism.
I think this is something the US really doesn't understand about Europe.
Socialism is about putting people first and making sure no one is left behind by society, which is the opposite of communism (and capitalism).
In fact, US capitalism is much closer to communism regarding societal outcomes (social injustice, power concentration) than European socialism. It is very much possible to be anti-capitalist and anti-communist at the same time .
Unsere Geschichte ist geprägt von der Idee des demokratischen Sozialismus, einer Gesellschaft der Freien und Gleichen, in der unsere Grundwerte verwirklicht sind. Sie verlangt eine Ordnung von Wirtschaft, Staat und Gesellschaft, in der die bürgerlichen, politischen, sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Grundrechte für alle Menschen garantiert sind, alle Menschen ein Leben ohne Ausbeutung, Unterdrückung und Gewalt, also in sozialer und menschlicher Sicherheit führen können.
Das Ende des Staatssozialismus sowjetischer Prägung hat die Idee des demokratischen Sozialismus nicht widerlegt, sondern die Orientierung der Sozialdemokratie an Grundwerten eindrucksvoll bestätigt. Der demokratische Sozialismus bleibt für uns die Vision einer freien, gerechten und solidarischen Gesellschaft, deren Verwirklichung für uns einedauernde Aufgabe ist. Das Prinzip unseres Handelns ist die soziale Demokratie.
You may want to look into the ideologies of European political parties that have "socialist" in their names, instead of relying on definitions from the Soviet revolution.
Socialism in Europe is social democracy. The only difference between "socialist" and "social democratic" parties in Europe is how fractionally close to the right or left side of the center line they are.
The definition of socialism does not change and has not changed, and it's not "social democracy".
Many European political parties that have "socialist" in their names are historically socialist but have all but abandonned that ideology in favour of social democracy (i.e they have moved right) because, as we know, socialism was tried and it failed so there has been a lot of soul-searching on the left since the fall of the USSR and al.
That does not mean that there aren't socialists anymore, including in major parties.
For the more central block parties, this is correct. But for many ultra-left and ultra-right parties, this is not necessarily true. There are true Marxist or Stalinist blocks in many of the ultra-left. There are straight-up fascists in the right wing "national socialist" parties.
ultra-right parties may have "socialist" in their name, but they are typically not in a sense connected to Marx&Hegel. Example: the "National-Sozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei" (Hitler's NSDAP) was not marxist.
Yes, and I never said so. But the post I replied to implied that socialist=social democratic.
And neither the marxist/communists in the far-left parties (and sometimes the whole party) nor the fascists in the far-right parties are social democratic.
(Of course there is no such thing as a "social democracy", in the sense that the government structure is modified from a "non-social" democracy. But there can be democrats who push for a socially oriented governance. For example: Let's have affordable healthcare. Yes, that means that it cost more for rich people..
Democrats here means "people who want to take part in a democracy". not the US party. Not that they are liberal in the European sense either.)
)
> But the post I replied to implied that socialist=social democratic
That's actually largely the case in Western/Middle Europe.
> marxist/communists in the far-left parties (and sometimes the whole party)
Which are often not seen as socialist. Social/socialist typically signals that the party is inside the system supporting political spectrum. "communist/marxist" usually signals that the party is at least partly outside the system supporting political spectrum.
It’s a mix that includes social democracy and democratic socialism, as well as things to the right of the former (Britain’s Labour is still nominally socialist) and left of the latter.
> Socialism is about putting people first and making sure no one is left behind by society, which is the opposite of communism (and capitalism).
The problem with that sentence is that you can say the same sentence with socialism/communism/capitalism in any order and you would find people who would sign it. And to some degree, maybe all would be right.
I was enjoying The Expanse until the Marco Inaros arc started. From that point onwards the show felt rushed, mostly repeating the formula of so many other shows, and sidestepped all the alien bits that could have been interesting.
I much preferred BSG, even though it had plenty of boring "west wing in space" episodes.
I thought the political episodes were some of the most interesting ones. I love how Apollo grew up to challenge the attempted coup and ultimately became President as the series wound down. Also loved Richard Hatch's Tom Zarek character and the religious cult formed around Gaius Baltar.
All in all, I really enjoy all the moral greys in the series.
The EU isn't a federation, and having a single currency doesn't make the eurozone any more so.
The buildings aren't as bad, being european insitution headquarters. However, as they aren't necessarily widely recognizable, they come out a bit self serving.