Island of stone money Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Island of stone money - Essay Example When the Germans gained possession of the island, they ordered the chiefs of the districts in the island to repair the paths that had been neglected and were in poor condition. When the chiefs declined to administer the repair of the roads, the Germans sought a way of imposing fine on them. A person was sent to each disobedient district to mark the most valuable Fei with a black cross to indicate that the government now owned the stones (Friedman 3). The people then felt impoverished, repaired the roads, and the government then sent its agents to erase the marks. Consequently, the people regained possession of their Fei. Despite these people’s apparent lack of knowledge on how monetary systems work, the article compares their beliefs with an incident in the U.S where the Bank of France requested the Federal Reserve Bank to store its gold in its account. Consequently, the Federal Bank put French gold in separate drawers and put a label to indicate that it belonged to the French. The two incidents illustrate how important myth is to monetary matters. People tend to believe that their own money is more real and rational than those used by other societies. Because of these myths, people fail to realize that money from other countries may have high purchasing powers than theirs (Friedman 5). One of the characteristics of Fei that qualified it as money was its use by these people as a medium that could be exchanged for goods and services. The durability of these stones, another characteristic of money, ensured that they performed their duty as a medium of exchange and store of value. Durability as a feature of money is critical since it develops confidence that an item can be exchanged later for other goods. Fei can be classified as commodity money because its value was independent of regulatory forces but dependent on attached value on its material. Act of the Germans to mark the stones illustrates this because of the adverse effects that it

Global Environmental Change Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 250 words

Global Environmental Change - Assignment Example hauls it to a centralized facility where workers or a machinery separate the wastes for recycling may found in understanding the characteristics and application of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, also known as the entropy law. What is Entropy? Requadt defines to Entropy as the amount of energy that cannot be converted into mechanical work. (Requadt, 2010). The term entropy is a measure of the degree to which energy has lost the capacity to perform useful work. Energy quality: According to the first energy law, energy can neither be created nor destroyed, one might think there will always be enough energy. Yet when you fill a cars tank with gasoline and drive around something is lost. If it isnt energy, then, what is it? The second law of energy, also known as the second law of thermodynamics provides the answer to this question. Energy varies in its quality or ability to do useful work. For useful work to occur energy must move or flow from a level of high-quality (more concentrated) energy to a level of lower-quality (less concentrated) energy like manifestation of the Second Law can be stated quite simply: Heat always flows spontaneously from hot (high-quality energy) to cold (low-quality energy). Heat energy will not flow from a cooler to a warmer body. It would be foolish to try to warm our hands on a block of ice although there is considerable heat in the ice. If we compare the heat of ice with the heat of liquid hydrogen, ice would appear to be very hot, indeed. It would be easy to build a machine that runs on the heat differential between the cold block of ice and the much colder liquid hydrogen. However, since the heat in the ice is at a much lower level than the heat in our body, heat cannot flow from the ice to our hands. We cannot warm our hands by immersing them in ice. We have always known this fact. Now we know why we cannot warm our hand by touching a block of ice. Any time work of any kind is done some energy is lost. In every mechanical