For clipping it means that when new coinage is minted that money is typically horded and the clipped coins are kept in circulation because they are deemed less valuable then their nominal value (the initial weight of the coin).

Why would someone use something more valuable in an exchange when the thing that's less valuable will suffice?

Gresham's Law would end up plaguing monarchy's and various governments for millenia and still to this day really.

We vastly under appreciate the very basic technology used to solve problems that existed for pretty much the entire world for thousands of years.

This created barriers to entry for valuation of money in the form of owning a scale that required higher precision in weight estimation. On top of that one can imagine that dispute that a merchants scale (this still probably happens even today) cheats was most likely common place.

It's fairly easy to imagine a cleverly placed point of additional friction can "tip the scales" in a merchants favor.

All that to say it would have been good to be in the "measurement" business way back in the day. Hell it's still a good business today, but we need it far less for the exchange of coinage/money which I think is a pretty great thing.

The ridges are to mitigate "clipping" which is the process of removing JUUUUUST enough metal from the coin as to not raise suspicion and people trade with them, but not enough to raise suspicion and get ... well killed by the Monarchy.

Learning about the history of money and how it completely shaped the world is pretty fascinating. There is a guy at University of Arizona who has a course on Youtube that covers this subject, HIGHLY recommend.

/s

I'm not against this, but consider that those damages are future unknown liabilities from when the product was first sold.

Do we really think that southern tobacco farmers or how ever far back the tobacco industry really goes, there was a forethought about the potential harm? I'd wager no, they saw a market for a product that people liked at the time I'd wager the entire idea of addiction was hardly understood when the industry started. From my historical knowledge addiction as a form of profit was first discovered by the East India Trading company as it was the first entity to trade opium to the Chinese, which by the way literally kept the English Monarchy from going bankrupt(more of a factoid then a piece relevant to my response).

My overall point is, we discover some harms because of scale or after long periods of time both of which are future liabilities. The discussion is WHEN we discover these harms at scale how do we handle them. Emergent harm is a society level issue, but for many products it's almost beyond a secondary or tertiary effect.

> I think at the least it's a matter of truth in advertising if you're aware of common negative side effects your product has and you don't disclose them. It's dishonest.

This isn't something I outright disagree with however the solution is one of incentive. It's clear that in the game of future liabilities for products as I think we can agree societal level harm is typically the more costly one both from a bottom line standpoint and from a human health or human harm standpoint.

The incentive here is pretty obvious sounding the alarm of harm is not in the interest of anyone profiting on it.

There is no incentive mechanism, it has been the problem all along. The peer review process is clearly inadequate or not up to the task in its current form.

If you can think of something that when used does not have unintended harm please let me know.

I agree that the topic of future liabilities is pretty sticky and seems highly case dependent.

With only this question as a guide the answer should be a resounding yes. Mainly because there are trade offs for everything. The downside to every trade off can be harm.

There are an immeasurable amount of ways harm can manifest, also answering no to this questions clearly incentivizes less, not more product transparency. I so desperately want to restate the question in a manner that accounts for the inevitability of discovered future liability, however it's not coming to me at the moment.

Incase anyone wants to look at an actual document which I didn't see linked in the article

https://www.washingtonpost.com/documents/b68f2951-2a4b-4822-...

The teachers that don't want to use them will continue to churn out students that score high and don't know how to articulate a damn thing. Which may have been the status quo anyway.

Edit: I didn't like my original post

I happen to have quite a long attention span on acid I'll have you know!