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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

[stub for offtopicness]

I've never seen a [stub for offtopicness] - so I'm just here for the experience.

Whats interesting is that on algolia all of these stubs show up as 0 comments, probably because of the way dang moves them.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I miss gov.uk sites so much

A ridiculous transaction cost by modern standards, especially when multiplied by all HM's various enterprises.

Except this kind of work spawned a nation of clerks and it has lasted a thousand years. Everybody has to think about the King's values, and implement them in their own little corner of the kingdom.

If Joe Biden changes his heraldry, it doesn't change my post office experience one whit.

Well while we’re discussing needless costs associated with changes in leadership shall we talk about those hilariously over the top inaugurations you have every four years?

Those are less expensive and less dramatic than a typical NFL game. Rather understated, given our national culture.

The real issue is how much of the cost is unwritten by private entities and what they might expect in return.

That's really unconcerning compared to the bulk of political spending. Also, the money spent on inaugurations is easily trackable; it comes out of a general fund. Absolutely pales in comparison to Congressional insider trading and stuff like Hunter Biden and Eric Trump do: making money off of implied considerations.

Can you enumerate the costs of those inaugurations?

Well, Trump said there were a million people at his inauguration (I know, this was an absurd bald face lie). I don’t know how much it costs to rent, set up and take down that many chairs, but I’m going to guess it was more than three fifty.

At risk of picking nits: they don't put up a million chairs. I attended the 2012 inauguration and we all stood on the grass in the National Mall.

(I agree with your overall point though. There were speaker towers arranged at intervals down the mall and plenty of crowd control involved in getting people to and from the event in the first place, none of which had to have been cheap.)

Not on the same magnitude of cost but each time there's a new president, portraits in military installations and government offices are updated. Many states have their governor on their welcome signs on roads and at airports. Some cities even do it for their mayor. At least with the Monarchy, it's not a routine expense like it is with frequent elections.

> Not on the same magnitude of cost but each time there's a new president, portraits in military installations and government offices are updated.

Chain-of-command portraits serve a practical, if minor, function; yes, more of them change when a chief executive changes than anyone else, but they also change when a batallion commander or civilian agency director changes, for the same reason as for a chief executive.

Heraldry of the monarch also serve a function, I suppose, but it is less like a chain of command photograph and more like the US national coat of arms (or the Great Seal, which has the former on the obverse); neither of which has changed substantially (there have been some rendering tweaks) since adopted by the Congress under the Articles of Confederation in 1782.

> Chain-of-command portraits serve a practical, if minor, function

And that function is that (for example) on a big Navy ship with thousands of sailors, the "lower ranks" might never have laid eyes on the commanding officer ("CO") or executive officer ("XO") but need to recognize him/her if s/he shows up unannounced and alone in a workspace — following the old nuclear-Navy rule that "you get what you INspect, not what you EXpect."

My apartment has a sign by the trash chute that says "Mayor Giuliani"

As you say, most of those aren't a big deal, except in Chicago. The Daleys started putting their name on EVERYTHING; it's always strange to visit from out of town and see it so branded.

Everything whimsical must be destroyed to facilitate deterritorialisation!

You should read up on the mini-boom in the Japanese paper industry when Hirohito died.

Now let's just hope Australia follows suit...by eliminating the crown entirely from government.

Context: Japanese dates count years from the accession of the current emperor (Reiwa 1 = 2019, Reiwa 2 = 2020, etc), so when the emperor changes, you need to renumber basically everything.

Bonus: you also get confused foreigners who think "6/12/20" is 6 Dec 2020 or even 12 June 2020, instead of 20 Dec 2024 (Reiwa 6). Fortunately the Japanese themselves are ISO-compliant and always use YYMMDD.

When/if an emperor reigns for over 100 years, would they shorten the format as-per-iso shorthand rules? That is, would the year Reiwa 106 also be written as 6/12/20 ?

> A ridiculous transaction cost by modern standards, especially when multiplied by all HM's various enterprises.

One corporate rebranding every quarter century is really cheap, by modern standards.

The average reign of a British monarch has been 25 years or so, since 1707, sure. But that’s skewed by two major outliers - Victoria (63 years) and Elizabeth II (70 years). Between the other 11 unitary monarchs the average is more like 17 years. Shorter turnovers are possible - four kings lasted 10 years or less. Not sure you’d get great odds on Charles beating that spread.

Especially now that he has cancer.

On the average, people in developed countries die ~30 years after their parents. I don't see why royal families should be an exception.

Among other factors, successor monarchs are disproportionately first children.

Yes, as I said, I think the Crown's rebranding might seem like a waste, but it's extremely useful for values/branding transmission.

When you see the branding story for, say, Google or Pepsi, that looks like money flushed straight down the toilet.

I'm not sure what the costs of this will be, but it'll be tiny on the scale of things. It's all done by GDS in-house, and the design is shared across every government site and app. Before GDS, there were constant rebranding projects across every corner of the government and civil service. Now this is done with one update to a shared design system.

The specific problem here is that Charles has done less than zero to endear himself to the public. So far his most obvious interactions have all been "Look at me! I'm king now!"

For example - this silly little exercise. And his request that there should be portraits of him in school and public offices.

This will have been filtered through courtiers saying "I'm really not convinced that's a good idea, your majesty." So these public proofs of his kingness seems very important to him.

Meanwhile much of the country is starving or in debt, shops and businesses are closing, and infrastructure is crumbling.

It's not a good look.

You didn’t like his lukewarm delivery of the King’s Speech or his Greek tie?

Not entirely sure what he is meant to do.

I am a committed republican but as far as Kings in a constitutional monarchy can go he’s been pretty demonstrative against government policy.

I'm defending neither the institution of the monarchy nor Charles as a person, but this particular exercise is standard, not a whim of his. Each monarch has their own personal cypher, and has had for years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_ZL7H7WCzM

And reflecting that cypher in the gov.uk branding was not Charles's choice.

> If Joe Biden changes his heraldry, it doesn't change my post office experience one whit.

Tiny in comparison, but don't government offices feature a portrait of the president in the entryway?

At least in the military, it's commonplace for the entranceway to the offices/working spaces of any unit to have a board with the official photos of the entire chop chain, from the President on down to the unit commanding officer.

And in basic training or the initial parts of officer training, one of the things people can be inspected on is having the names of everyone on that chain memorized. Not because that's something most military people routinely do, just to drive the point home of lawful orders and civilian control.

Based on https://uspsblog.com/the-history-behind-the-usps-logo/ it seems the post office rebrands more often than GOV.UK did, at least up until now ;)

Isn’t it time to abolish the monarchy?

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(p.s. before anyone bites my crownless head off: no the mod is not arguing for monarchy, and yes that would be just as much of a flamebait generic tangent.)

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