I suspect it's because nobody wants to admit that a penny has become worthless, and probably a nickel too. Also, there may be people who are worried that they will start getting ripped off by the rounding process.
I read a book about units of measure, and there was often strong local resistance to adopting regional or national standards because folks thought it would be a chance for merchants to surreptitiously raise prices. They were probably right.
In Argentina we unofficially deprecate the coin/bill when they are worth approximately US$0.03 (don't ask how I made statistics).
Now all prices are rounded to AR$10. The AR$20 and AR$50 bills are fine, but the AR$10 bills are very old and almost destroyed. The AR$10 are still used because otherwise it's difficult to pay some values. (I've not seen a AR$5 bill in the wild since January or February.)
Soon we will round all prices to AR$50 and unofficially deprecate the AR$20 bills.
> Now all prices are rounded to AR$10 ... Soon we will round all prices to AR$50
A 5x change in what constitutes a negligible amount of money on a human-noticeable timeframe seems like a shocking rate of inflation. For reference, $3 here in the United States has about the same buying power that $1 did in 1982, 40 years ago. So the price of common consumer goods has only risen 3x in a time frame that represents more than half the average human lifespan in this country.
"Argentina's inflation rate will end the year at 210% and remain high in 2024, investment bank J.P. Morgan said in a note after the new government of libertarian President Javier Milei sharply devalued the peso currency in a bid to tackle a major economic crisis.
The South American country's new government is battling to bring down the highest inflation rate since 1991, warning of possible hyperinflation without tough austerity measures.
The government unveiled a package of "shock" economic measures earlier this week to overturn a deep fiscal deficit, and devalued the peso currency by over 50%, which it admits will in the short term fan inflation further.
J.P. Morgan expects monthly inflation in December to be 25%, which would take the annual rate to around 210%. Prices rose 12.8% in November before the recent devaluation.
The bank added that planned subsidy cuts and increases in taxes would accelerate prices in the first half of 2024."
I'd almost say if you were going to go down to 2 coins it might actually make more sense to have and $0.10 and $0.50 pieces. I.e. force all prices to a multiple of 0.1 instead of 0.01 but leave a larger coin to make larger totals or scrounging up more than a dollar when you don't have a bill go quicker.
Or even just go straight to quarters being the only change at all. A penny CPI adjusted from when they got rid of the half penny in the US (1857) is already worth $0.35 today.
It'll go quicker, but it won't save space! Unless we make smaller half dollars, just as the gold colored dollar coins took over after the large dollar coins we had previously. Perhaps something with a diameter similar to a nickel but a thickness similar to a penny or quarter.
This is a good idea. Rebasing on 10¢. I proposed dropping to a 25¢ smallest-coin standard elsewhere in the thread, but dropping the quarter and going 10¢/50¢/$1 is also a good plan.
Pennies and nickels definitely should go. They’re not even worth picking up off the ground.
Is it possible to have a bank account or electric bill for a fraction of a crown?
In the distant past when I still named computers, I'd always make sure to have a zloty and a kopek somewhere in the zoo; typically they'd be NIS servers or recursive DNS servers or other similarly important task trivially serviced by an antiquated server I had fondness for and wanted an excuse to not retire. "You can't turn off those SLCs; they're the NIS servers for the statistics department..."
Cash based commerce should just be rounded to the 1/10th dollar not the 1/100th dollar; there's just no need for such precision.
I'd just announce that while still legal tender, the penny, nickle, and quarter won't be minted any longer except in low volumes for collectors, and that cash transactions may be rounded down to the nearest 10th dollar if proper change is not available.
IE a cup of coffee costing $4.17 would cost $4.10 if paying cash. I suspect vendors would just update the cost of everything to land on the 1/10th increment.
I guess you may need to worry about people playing arbitrage games with metered things like gasoline, but even there it's probably just a marginal problem.
Dime is a weird word; it doesn't convey that it's a tenth of a dollar, does it?
[edited to add examples and digression on gasoline]
re: arbitrage games with metered things like gasoline, we got rid of pennies in Canada a decade ago so I can tell you how it affected getting gas. Initially, some people switched games from the classic "try to get a whole number of dollars exactly" to "try to get two cents above a whole number of dollars", as that gets rounded down when you pay cash. However, that was also around the time that paying with cards for everything became the norm, so it stopped mattering because credit/debit card transactions don't get rounded. Worth noting, in response to the sibling comment, that if you buy $20.02 of gas for $20, you get a 0.1% discount, which I doubt throws off the owners' books. This would be 0.2% max if the nickel was also eliminated.
There were also jokes about buying one grape at a time so the whole bag got rounded to 0, but I worked at a grocery store for two years and never saw anyone try to exploit the rounding, even to a lesser extent :)
Gasoline isn’t a digression, it’s a great example of why removing precision from prices is a bad idea.
Imagine you own a gas station. Your actual cost to fill your tanks is some multiple of the price you can charge per gallon. Requiring 10 cent-rounded prices kneecaps your ability to efficiently price your product.
Flipping it around, if you think $1/10 increments are good enough for a gas station owner, why aren’t they good enough for Microsoft when its shares are traded? Decimalization in equity markets has been widely seen as a success because more precise prices communicate information about the relative interests of buyers and sellers more accurately.
Given the predominance of digital transactions, it’s hard to argue that the transactional efficiency gains of less precise prices are worth the downsides.
> Imagine you own a gas station. Your actual cost to fill your tanks is some multiple of the price you can charge per gallon. Requiring 10 cent-rounded prices kneecaps your ability to efficiently price your product.
This is… already the situation?
Most gas stations where I am are pricing their product in thousands of a cent and rounding the total off to the nearest cent when it’s time to pay.
We got rid of the penny a decade ago in Canada. It just means that for cash transactions the gas station rounds off to the nearest five cents instead. The most they can “lose” is two cents _on the total transaction_. Hardly seems different than losing several tenths of a cent on some transactions (as they already were) in aggregate.
also strangely missing from this discussion about the supposed outrages of pricing when you round, and losing 0.1 or 0.2% in cash payments, is that credit card companies will charge that gas station is a bit over 2%. So no matter what coin you abolish, the gas station comes out on top on the cash payment, even if it's the quarter. It'd still come out on top if it was the dollar bill/coin for bills under $200, so, pretty much always.
It's more "already handled" than missing. Gas stations already often advertise a cash price and paying by credit gives you a higher price which includes the markup. It's perhaps the most commonly used type of business that bothers to do this because the margins are so thin.
Well, my statement was for _cash_ transactions, and why I mentioned arbitrage.
We could as easily add a 1/1000th unit to the dollar, and mandate that for cash transactions round to the 1/10th but for credit and other electronic transactions they'd be to the "iota" or some other charming term for the millidollar. I'm pretty sure that aeons ago there were half pennies, so it isn't completely absurd.
Also, I'm pretty sure that in the not so distant past stocks used some weird fraction of dollars not decimals[1].
[edited to add example of fractionally denominated stock prices]
[edit2: ah, sorry you mentioned the fractional stock issue with the observation "precise values are good" which they are. I still retain my position that, for retail cash based commerce, precise values are less valuable than the time invested in the transaction. ]
It's because there's one company that produces the weird bronze-plated-zinc blanks used for cents, and it resides in a politically powerful legislator's district.
Since it also features Lincoln, the Illinois contingent will also cling to it for dear life.
great! we haven't had a dollar coin released in a while, let's deprecate the penny and put Lincoln on a dollar coin! he can be featured as part of a rotation of existing dollar coins over the next several years as we get them back into circulation.
They already put him on a $1 coin in 2010. They went through every president starting in the mid-2000s, but by the time they had gotten to him, we had plenty of $1 coins in the vaults, so the mintage was small and not-for-circulation-- about 97 million coins total. (By comparison, the 2000 Sacajawea type was over 1.2 billion)
US should drop nickel and dime, go to 25¢, 50¢, and $1 coins.
Nothing smaller than a quarter’s really worth screwing with, when dealing with physical currency. We’ve gone so long without dropping the penny that the dime’s nearly worthless, too.
One problem is sales tax. With a percentage calculation after a sale, uneven totals are the rule. It would be better if retail prices all included tax, rounded already.
Not even true next door in Canada. Don't know why so many are in love with the phrase "every other country" to attack the US when it only serves to destroy their credibility.
In many eurozone countries totals are rounded to the nearest 5 cents at the register if you pay cash. If you pay electronically then the exact amount is debited.
There are some weirdos who decide how to pay based on whether or not the rounding is in their favor (e.g if the total ends in a 2 they'll pay cash but if it ends in a 3 they'll pay with card). But I don't think these amounts are enough for stores to care, especially considering how much they save by not having to deal with 1¢ and 2¢ coins.
A guy in Canada tried this when they got rid of the penny. After a bunch of careful scheming, he ended up…$0.89 (or something like that—-it was certainly under a buck).
I'm not opposed to that, but the problem is then the $.25 coins will be worthless due to inflation, and then the $.50, and so on. We would just be kicking the can down the road, unless we can stop the government from continuing to debase the currency.
The problem in the US is that the local sales tax is the sum of sales taxes created by several independent authorities. These authorities have varying geographic and subject matter scope, and can modify their sales tax on their own schedule. There are effectively thousands of independent sales tax jurisdictions in the US and the details of the computation in those jurisdictions churn regularly. By “late binding” the sales tax, they avoid having to churn the printed/published prices.
I think there is also a policy view that taxes should not be hidden, that there is a public interest in making the public aware of precisely how much they are paying in taxes. Taxes that are baked into the price tend to be forgotten about by the public.
> By “late binding” the sales tax, they avoid having to churn the printed/published prices.
Strictly speaking, you don't have to change the total price if the tax rate changes, you can change the base price so that the total comes out the same. This is how prices are typically set in Europe, though vendors can of course change prices in response to tax rate changes, but it doesn't normally happen automatically.
Now, you might argue this hides the tax even more, if the customer doesn't even notice a price change when the rate changes, but one could also argue the latter is a good thing for the customer (if the business decides to eat the cost, at least for a while).
It's a solved thing, for the cash round down, for the credit/plastic/online pay as is.
If you remove $0.01 then round down to the nearest .05, if you remove $0.10 then round down to nearest 0.10; so both $9.99 and $9.95 would be $9.90. Simple.
From 1997 until 2021 it was at a stable 2-4%. 1985-1995 it was 5%-10%, and 1965-1985 it was 10-20%.
Also, if you compare inflation of say Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Estonia and Estonia (or any other comparable countries), you will have a difficult time spotting which ones of them have Euro and when it was adopted.
The removal of the penny was done in Canada at a time when the government needed a distraction from a scandal. It worked fabulously, and was way more popular than people expected due to the pro-penny faction being way louder than the silent majority who were glad to be rid of the things.
It devastated the wishing fountain industry though, it still hasn’t recovered. Neither has Canadian wish delivery. There’s only so much the Make a Wish Foundation can compensate.
Gross Domestic Wish Production down 42% from their 2011 peak. Many sectors that were ancillary to the wish industry (Make A Wish foundation included) had to move onto manufacturing Hopes, Dreams, and Aspirations, which sadly even as a combined accounting group still don't generate the sort of revenue we saw with the WishEx market during the predepennification era. I think about my grandfather, who worked in wishmithing before it was even regulated, selling scrap copper to throw into ponds to the local community. Maybe we need to return to that, locally sourced wishes would be a smaller industry, but it would open up new opportunities for the next generation to get into the craft.
Was during the Harper government era, like another commenter said, there was basically constant on-going scandals at the time. Big populist decisions like breaking up Make A Wish Canada Ltd (or at least putting some pressure on them) was a distraction from a lot of shady government dealings happening at the time. I think most people assumed we'd see a more bespoke wish market arise, but sadly the downgrading of MAW Canada, then it's eventual restructuring lead to a buy out by Rogers Communications Ltd, who very quickly laid off the Joy and Magic department. They're pretty much just a holding company for the IP now. Things just aren't like they used to be here.
In the US, there are other weird complications if prices were rounded to the nearest nickel. One that is not mentioned much is that some large businesses have used the last digit of the price to encode metadata for decades. It is the equivalent of a tagged pointer in software, except the extra bits are buried in the least significant digit of the price, precisely because changing the value by a couple cents was below the pricing noise floor. I have to imagine quantizing prices to the nearest nickel would create Y2K-like software problems for some companies which makes them an interested party in maintaining the status quo.
You don't have to quantize the unit price to the smallest coin, only the total final purchase amount. Gasoline is typically priced at $x.xx9/gallon, with the "unit" ending in 9/10th's of one penny, and this doesn't break anything, they just use bankers rounding before calculating the final payment amount.
Similarly, sales taxes often result in a fractional penny as well, which again gets floor() or bankers_rounding().
If the US rounds everything to nickels, then the current system of 1-5-10-25-100, which needs an 18-cent piece, becomes (after division by 5) a new system of 1-2-5-20, which needs... what new denomination ? Maybe none ?
Actually, if I had to guess about the US situation, I'd tend to blame the zinc lobby. US 1 cent coins are mostly made of zinc now, and only plated with copper.
Do you remember when someone decided the Starbucks holiday cups weren't Christmas-y enough, and part of a war on Christmas? Major news stations covered the issue. Politicians gave comment (Trump also chimed in).
They don't want to get rid of the penny because they know someone will try to pull a similar stunt. At this point it's a proven strategy to get free press and social media attention.
One issue they mention is that you lose the simple greedy algorithm for making change. For example, for $0.38 it's better to give 2x$0.18 plus 2 pennies (4 coins), but many might intuitively give back a quarter, a dime, and 3 pennies (5 coins). Besides the added complexity, introducing a new coin solely to reduce the amount of change given is not effective if it is not used optimally.
0.38 should actually just be 0.40, possibly 0.35 if the seller's generous. in physical transactions nobody pays 3.1415926 dollars for anything, even if the pricing algorithm says that's what you should charge. you just round to the nearest available coinage.
And what algorithm did you use to find that? As per the comment you replied to, the greedy algorithm no longer works, and you have to exhaustively search through all possibilities of coins.
Silliness aside, I love that someone is trying to come up with something innovative with cash.
I carry and use cash whenever I can. It might only have a few more years of value as more and more places adopt pervasive surveillance and facial recognition technology, but I'm going to hold out for anonymous purchases as long as I can. The only entity that should be able to know my complete purchase history is me.
> The area covered by 100 one dollar bills measures 11.13 square feet.
comes out to about $9/sq. ft., about 9 times as expensive.
But 1USD=90RUB today, and the lowest denominated note is 5RUB, coming out to 1USD=18notes. Each note is 137 mm × 61 mm, coming out to about 0.09 sq. ft. (if I'm not mistaken). Then 1USD=1.62 RUB sq. ft., so it costs
$0.62/sq. ft.
to have a green wall of ~~current~~ obsolete Russian currency.
What's surprising is that you can afford it even if you live in Russia. According to Obi and this roll of wallpaper:
the price per area isn't that different, coming out to about $2/sq. ft., meaning that if you have a clever way to paste all the single notes easily and know how not to get in any potential trouble with the law, it makes economical sense to get your wallpaper at the bank.
EDIT: according to Wikipedia, the note has been replaced by coins, and the next one is almost but not quite 10x as expensive by area.
Having recently done a remodel this sounds weirdly but extremely true. What would be the downsides? What would you grout with? How durable are they with water and constant friction?
I think it's a joke, unless they are referring to setting them under a poured layer of epoxy like some bars do (or the reddit thread from other commenter).
For tiling, it would be difficult to set them because they are so thin. The thinset would end up being at or above the level of your grout. Also cleaning grout from them while float grouting would probably not be very fun. Maybe you could get away with setting them straight onto a layer of grout which would be less durable. Also they are so small and they don't come on a mat so you'd pay a lot of labor for placing them in any sort of organized manner
Not flooring, but I used pennies for weight on my son’s pinewood derby car. I couldn’t buy weights for cheaper and putting some shiny ones under enamel looked pretty cool.
I think you mean two out of three, given that only three are variable.
The penny is fixed, as you say, lest the set size fall sharply from 99 to 19 (if there's no smaller than a 5c piece) etc. at which point optimal coinage varies anyway.
Before COVID forced the near ubiquitous use of debit/credit cards, there would be several times a month where I would confirm to the person ahead of me in line that the teller was correct on the amount of the bill/change or, less often, that the teller was wrong.
banks tend to charge money to accept large amounts of coins.
if shops don't want coins then they shouldn't charge stupid prices that keep giving me lots of change. i get change, i pay with change.
and if old people being slow really bothers you that much then don't get in the queue behind them. you have to allow them to do things at their own pace. one day we'll all be old and we'll appreciate if we are not made to feel being unwelcome.
So many times I would get my dime and two pennies back along with another dime and three pennies. The only thing I use cash for anymore is laundry and panhandlers.
This analysis assumes a uniform distribution of the amounts paid. With stores tending to charge $?.99 for their products and many people buying only a handful of products in small transactions, I suspect the distribution isn't all that balanced.
With the power of the modern internet, we could pool together receipts all across the world and design a change system fit for real world usage.
You’re forgetting grocery stores, which tend to price merchandise according to bulk prices, which aren’t often pretty, plus a store markup. Items priced by weight are even less likely to come out to a $*.99-style price.
Maybe. I have years of payment history with several grocery stores stored in my bank's transaction history, could be a fun little project to figure out what my optimal coin system would look like!
You jest, but given America’s preference for traditional units of measure, I’m amazed they adopted a decimal currency to begin with.
Pretty sure they’d still be on the Julian calendar if Britain hadn’t switched over before American independence, too. Think about the bullet we dodged there, programmers who hate time zones.
The dominance of America at least means time zones are well supported. Had a country like U.K, China or India - all country with a single time zone - dominated the early computing development time zones could very much be an afterthought.
It may make sense but I cannot support this lunacy in the United States no matter how much formal proof you throw at me until we outlaw all standardized testing in education.
This will just give ETS / the college board / whoever fodder to ask even more stupid multiple choice questions.
(No, I am not mathematically inclined and have won no Fields medals or even ever competed in one. I am just an ordinary person so this is just a personal opinion.)
I was going to suggest that adding a 12 or 24 cent piece would be an easier sell since people are already used to dealing with 12's due to clocks.
But in my observation, the younger generations are less adept at that -- if I tell my nephew it's "quarter 'till 3", he says "I don't know what that means", then I explain it and he has to really think about it and do the math in his head to figure out what time it is. Which makes sense since I grew up reading analog clock, and he most often uses his phone or iWatch with a digital time display most of the the time -- the habit of breaking time into quarters is not as intuitive.
I always thought it was a weird colloquialism. Saying quarter to three takes exactly the same number of syllables as two forty-five, and the latter is more clear when communicating. You’re also using the word “to” which could be confused with “two” if the communication is garbled over the radio or a bad connection.
Maybe it's to convey a lack of precision, "quarter till 3" is ambiguous and could be anywhere from around 2:41-2:49 (pretty much any time the minute hand is past 40 and before 50), while if you say 2:45 you generally mean 2:45 (2:40, of course is "20 till 3", but is also a bit ambiguous)
It feels easier and more natural to round to the nearest 5 or 15 minutes with an analog clock than a digital clock. But I grew up in a time when analog clocks were the norm and digital clocks and watches were an expensive novelty (or used for special purpose clocks) so I became used to analog clocks (and use an analog display on my watch, even though I could just as easily set it to a digital display).
When I do use a digital clock, I generally read the time that's displayed, I don't mentally round to the nearest 5 or 15 minutes, only with an analog clock.
I don't really feel every minute passing. If I want to know what time of day it is, putting it in terms of hours is more useful. If you're setting a timer or something where the minutes matter, then you can say 2:45.
If you have a wristwatch with hands you may not want to identify the exact minute (this can be a little difficult if it has a smaller face), but if it's 5 minutes either way then a "quarter-to" is close enough.
When I was in college, it was a thing for students to design and build a digital LED clock out of random logic. A friend of mine wanted to make one that would tell time only in 15 minute chunks, as nobody needed more precise time than that.
Yes, I did a digital clock, too, my first digital design/build. It never did work right.
Took me ages to remember what folks in the UK mean when they say “half six” — it’s 6:30, not “half to six” — even just now I had to double check myself.
This is varies by language. In several languages including English, "half six" is an abbreviation of "half [[an hour] past] six". In others, it's "half [[an hour] to] six".
Typically we say half past six though which is a bit clearer. That can sometimes get a little blurred with accents particularly some northern ones haf ‘pa six.
But "halfway to six" should be three, surely? (Sorry!)
As a British person who learned Swedish -- which also uses that convention -- around the age of 10, I often found myself a little uncertain when hearing "half six" in English, as I grew up with the more explicit "half past six".
in austria you can learn about "viertel sechs" (quarter six) and "dreiviertel sechs" (three quarter six).
i'll let you work out whether those are "viertel nach fünf" (quarter past five) or "viertel vor sechs" (quarter to six), or "viertel nach sechs" (quarter past six), or "viertel vor sieben" (quarter two seven)
I grew up with analog clocks. How I would answer would probably depend on where I got the answer from. If it came from an analog clock I'd probably say quarter to. If from a digital clock I'd probably give a rounded answer like 2:45.
My experience is that I didn’t really ‘get’ analog clocks until I was old enough to start managing my own schedule. They’re useful for quickly visualizing addition/subtraction of intervals*, but until I was a grown-up I just didn’t need that skill, since times were always told to me by adults rather than something I regularly needed to calculate for myself.
* (“How long until I need to leave to catch the bus for that appointment? Oh, it’s twenty to quarter before half past three, I still have some time”)
Fwiw I'm 43 and much the same. I grew up with a microwave clock and a digital watch and never got to the point of being able to glance at an analog clock and read the time. I can figure it out but it's not intuitive.
I prefer an analog clock because I can read it at a glance without even needing my glasses. Without glasses, a 7 segment display just looks like a row of 8's.
Maybe interesting aside: I saw a link to this when it was first published at the height of the p2p networks craze and noticed some similarities between the two.
One of my students at the time, Mahadev Konar, ended up writing a paper "Ring-like DHTs and the Postage Stamp Problem" [1] that shows how you can use solutions to the postage stamp problem (aka denomination-choosing problem) as a way to structure the finger pointers in Chord. And went on to co-found Hortonworks.
Sometimes random things on HN end up having implications in other areas!
>Same reason(s) we haven’t finished switching to the metric system.
You're not totally wrong but like the UK we (US) tend to use the metric system where it actually matters and use our variant of Imperial for everyday things which makes perfect sense for anyone who grew up with it. Aside from not having a well-developed intuitive sense for what Celsius means from a comfort perspective when traveling, I can pretty much use whatever local units are in use. (My only real limitation at home is that, aside from my scale, I have very little metric measuring gear so I have to convert.)
Having lived in the UK, I found the balance between systems to be quite nice. I think that the Imperial System is actually underrated for daily use: most of the measurements are intuitive (based on sensory information and easily visualizable objects) and align better with common uses of measurements (rough approximations and division into equal parts). I think the metric system is beautiful and elegant, but for non-scientific tasks I don’t think it’s as valuable.
Thats what people say who have grown up with the system. If you grew up with the metric system in day to day life then you'd say the same.
eg A Metre is a distance between two held out hands. A litre is half a 2l bottle. A kg is the same weight as a litre of water or a small bag of something like sugar. I instinctively know how hot 10, 15 20 or 30 degrees is.
I grew up with 20 and 30cm rulers so I can picture how big they are. At school we had various weights around. Stuff is sold in metric weights.
By “two held out hands”, do you mean a person’s wingspan? Is there something similar for centimeters? I’m asking out of genuine curiosity and not antagonizing. I would love to have more tools at my disposal. An inch, for example, is the length of the first digit of the index finger. [0]
With length, I find that most of my use cases are division into equal parts as opposed to scaling. The imperial system was designed for this (frequently using base 12) [1]. I understand that this may be due to my framing.
I agree with the sibling comment about temperature granularity. Fahrenheit set 0 degrees to the coldest temperature in his hometown, then used freezing water and body temperature as reference points. 100 degrees is about body temperature, and around as hot as ambient temperature gets for many people.
[0] Useless trivia: an acre is one chain (66’) by one furlong (660’) and was supposed to be the amount a field a single ox could plow in a day. Neither of the latter two measures are commonly used anymore but a mile was redefined from 5000’ to 5280’ to make it an even 8 furlongs.
[1] Apparently this is the reason that the French failed twice to establish Metric Time
Come on, surely you don't believe your own argument. If thermostats can offer fractional-degree adjustment in fahrenheit, they can offer it in celsius.
> Aside from not having a well-developed intuitive sense for what Celsius means from a comfort perspective when traveling
20 Celsius is comfortable. Plus or minus 20 (so 0 C and 40 C) and you're at extreme temperatures that will kill in a few hours of unmitigated exposure.
So the questions then are: Is it above or below 20 C. How far above or below?
3 above, comfortable. 10 above, probably comfortable, bring some water if you'll be doing physical work. 20 above, make sure you have a large supply of water available to avoid heat stroke. 10 below, wear a jacket. 20 below, wear a warm coat and maybe gloves. Etc.
I have some more complicated conversions in my head but, for a lot of purposes, a liter is about a quart, a kilometer is about half a mile, and a kilogram is about two pounds. Those suffice for a lot of rough conversions I encounter when traveling. I suppose I could sit down and just memorize some F to C conversions.
Miles and kilometers can be estimated by the Fibonacci Sequence. The conversion (mi -> km) is very nearly the golden ratio (1.61 and approximately 1.62, respectively, IIRC). For any number in the sequence taken as miles, the subsequent number is the distance in kilometers. Your way is probably quicker, but it’s a fun bit of information.
We haven't switched to the metric system because there's no benefit for most people, simple as. The only people who would benefit are those who regularly need to deal in metric already, and children who would no longer need to learn the common imperial conversions. Most adults know the common conversions, and don't need to deal in metric for anything. Meanwhile, those same people would need to relearn how to estimate everything in metric units, which is a huge pain in the ass for them.
When you are trying to advance a measure which brings most people no benefits, and also incurs significant costs on them, it shouldn't be surprising that it's not popular. It's not exactly rocket surgery.
Great 2002 logic - but that's practically the archaic 20th century. People, it's 2023!
There should be a wildcard coin with an NFC chip & e-paper display. Vendors & consumers should be able to load/drain it of any sub-$1 (or local smallest bill) amount needed - via proven-untraceable methods, like zk-proof-based e-cash.
So let's call it an 'Aenny', pronounced 'enny', as portmanteau from 'any [amount]' and 'penny'.
Anyone carrying physical cash would also typically carry a single Aenny - maybe as part of a physical wallet or bill-clip or even jewelry. Any 'change' made to them would simply adjust their Aenny balance as needed to keep physical transfers nice round full-bill amounts.
But mass-produced, they'd be so cheap you could have 'take an Aenny, leave an Aenny' plates with free blanks at every register.
All legacy fiat coins can then become collectors' items – or exchangeable, by law, to banks for one Aenny per cent. (Your quarter gets you 25 Aennies.)
Progressive jurisdictions that become comfortable with the system could potentially increase the maximum value held on an Aenny – which is always a cash-like anonymous bearer instrument, with all the benefits & risks that implies – to be far more than the smallest cash bill size.
Eventually, most routine daily purchases could be completed by direct Aenny-to-Aenny rebalances – occasionally handing over the unit itself, as if were physical cash, as necessary.
Blockchain and crypto have made any discussion of digital currency sound toxic. I almost downvoted reflexively. But to the extent it can be implemented without blockchain it sounds like a good idea.
Technology, as modern sorcery, is neither inherently good nor evil, but is infused with its maker's spirit and intent. What a refreshing spirit is displayed in this idea!
I’d probably rather the opposite, dollar bills and no coins. There are very few things I can spend less than $1 on and coins are much more annoying to carry.
I can stuff some bills in the mini-wallet I carry. Coins mean they're either rattling around in my pocket or I need to carry some sort of coin purse. And, when I travel, I end up with this bag of unfamiliar coins that I'm trying to figure out at the counter. (Though I use cash when traveling at fewer and fewer places these days.)
Interesting read indeed! We need more innovation in this space. I am in the camp of cash users for several reasons. Increasingly, electronic forms of currency and credit are used as a means to exert control over vast majority of the population. The data can be misused by government and private entities to profile and target certain minorities. Crypto was supposed to solve this but that hasn't really panned out as governments do not want competition to their fiat currency.
Using physical money is starting to shift in some areas of my state. At several marching band competitions this past year, venders wouldn't accept cash at all.
This is the first time I ran into this and was a little surprised. Then, we went to a high school football game in a local, smaller town and it was cash only!
I'm guessing cash only because of card fees and cards only because of possible theft or bank fees?
Blame Knuth. Afaik the font used simulates closely the typesetting of the original art of programming edition that was printed using hot metal typesetting on an old monotype machine. Later these machines were eliminated for more modern techniques but he didn’t like the look so developed TeX to achieve a fidelity with those machines for art of computer programming later editions and new volumes. It has been almost universally adopted in academia since.
TeX use is minor to unheard of outside of Math, CS, Physics, +/- economics and engineering and a few other fields. A rarity in most life sciences, medicine, humanities where most journals will not even accept a final submission in TeX.
It's largely used as a status symbol to show that you know how to code in LaTeX.
That said, something is wrong with this PDF, it looks like it has been rasterized somewhere in the process, which is not normal. LaTeX usually outputs nice clean curves on the text.
It's a font resolution problem, serif fonts from a PDF generated by a modern LaTeX compiler like XeLaTeX are still more readable. If you zoom in, you'll see the fonts are bitmaps so it's low resolution with no anti-aliasing. Apparently, the original METAFONT Computer Modern is rasterized after rendering, meanwhile today most people have switched to its Type-I equivalent, which remains vectorized in PDFs.
The biggest problem our society has with counting is decimal. If we used a base with more factors, our counting would be more flexible, and we wouldn't have to deal with as many remainders and rounding.
Just imagine what the metric system would be like if it were made out of duodecimal (base-twelve) instead of decimal! It would be great.
Unfortunately, it's far too late. Changing bases would introduce way too much overhead.
But the British system wasn't really "just" duodecimal either, I recall 20 shilling to a pound and 12 pence to a shilling.
I don't recall, but I know about, 4 farthings to a penny.
And if Terry Pratchett is to be believed, it was a much worse mess that that.
The paper mentions how it's preferred to say "1 cent" rather than "penny" about US coinage, which reminds me of how shocked I was when I first encountered a bunch of US currency. Depending on the year it was made, most of the coins don't say how much they're worth on them. e.g. cent, nickle, dime, quarter rather than however many cents it is.
Digitally encoded coins - 1 cent to $10 with everyone having small readers/value assigners linked to account or other portable value store.
Made hard to fake, your store = size of a credit card - flat near field access.
Do stores in the UK actually hand back a single penny for a £0.99 purchase? If I buy something for €0.99 in the Netherlands, I won't get my cent back if I hand over a €1 coin. The 1 and 2 cent coins still exist, but shops all but banned them and round to the nearest multiple of 5 cents.
Rather - you should be asking the question, why don’t the shops in the Netherlands, just mark up the price, to €1 instead?! Seems incredibly stupid, to me.
Shops worldwide do this; whether it is $1.99, €1,99, £1.99 or ¥499. It's a psychological trick. The exceptions (like the Dutch HEMA for which whole unit prices are part of its heritage) use it as a distinguishing feature, but most shops don't dare to.
Do people in the UK use cash? I was in London for a week before I finally needed to get some cash to pay for a contractor for illegal services (a forbidden historical tour), later I needed coins to do laundry and the convenience store didn't have enough for a load of wash and a dry, he changed enough for a wash and the pub across the street had enough for a dry.
In my experience a lot of people still like to withdraw their salary when it arrives and spend it as cash. It depends on demographic. In cities like London and Bristol card-only pubs are common.
Sorry what? Are you saying that every shop will short change you in the Netherlands? There would be uproar here in the UK. That one penny will be handed to you 100% of the time in the UK. Surely if such a policy was in force they should be forced to round down and so return you 5 cents.
Short or long change you, depending on the amount, so in the long run it evens out assuming you buy multiple items at a time with a certain variance in cost.
€2.97 will net you 2 whole cents if you pay €3 in cash and get a five cent coin back.
There's a lot of rounding in stores. I don't think anyone cares for 1 cent coins (most stores don't accept them anyway).
With digital payments taking care of transferring the exact amount with no additional surcharges for at least 20 years, I don't think it's a pressing issue. If I cared for my 1 cent, I'd pay through NFC or by card.
Stores are allowed to round to round to 0 or 5 cent if they indicate they do. This can also work in your favour; €1,07 will be rounded down to €1,05 if the store rounds to fives, and you should be given your 5 cent coin if you pay with €1,10. I've never checked if stores actually do that, though; I think it's been a decade since I last paid with cash at the grocery store, so all I can tell you is the law and explanation the government provides: https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/geldzaken/vraag-en-...
Saw the title and immediately though of the Army Man joke (from the first page of the first issue!): "What this country needs is a good 5¢ sports car."
Better to keep 5c and 25c rather than 10c and 25c imo, if you're keeping two. 10 is fairly redundant when you have 5 and 25. (Even more so with 5 and 20, as with bills.)
What the US needs is to abolish all coins except the quarter. Due to inflation, a penny in 1913 is worth about 30 cents now. And somehow they made do with no smaller coins than the penny (the half cent having been discontinued in 1857).
Why are we shuffling these worthless bits of metal around? I’m sure it’s to enrich some medium size companies in a few important Congressional districts.
We dropped the penny in Canada in 2012 and I can’t say that I’ve missed it at all. Penny are still charged if your paying by bank or credit card, otherwise price is rounded to nearest 5c.
> If the price ends in a one, two, six, or seven it gets rounded down to 0 or 5; and rounded up if it ends in three, four, eight or nine.
Because the savings would be less than peanuts in the grand scheme of things that the government spends money on.
Because the Left would be galvanized by a million blog posts and academic papers (basically the same thing these days), arguing that it's racist because people of color are more likely to be underbanked and use cash. Yes I realize that's nonsense, but it wouldn't matter.
Because the Right would probably be galvanized too, by complaints that the government was meddling too much in the familiar and somehow ripping people off. Yes I realize that's nonsense, but it wouldn't matter.
It's so hard to make anything happen in U.S. politics today... eliminating pennies, nickels, and dimes wouldn't even make my Top-10,000 list of priorities.
> by complaints that the government was meddling too much in the familiar and somehow ripping people off
It would be about inflation. Just as only Nixon could go to China, it's probably only Republican initiative that can nix the penny--they could brand it as thriftiness.
Unfortunately, zinc is mined in red states and districts [1]. A President would have to lead the charge.
The "left" that you are referring to opposes eliminating cash. The reasons often given in hearsay and by journalists and blog posts are often exclusively focused on "people of color" who are underbanked, but the complaint is much more concisely stated as BEING OPPOSED TO THE PRIVITIZATION OF CURRENCY. Which seems fucking reasonable as shit to me.
I don't understand how there's any advocacy behind abolishing units of currency. I literally never pay for anything with cash and so I never receive any change. I don't see how it's a daily nuisance for some people
A penny costs 2.7 cents to make. We make almost 8 billion of them per year. That's $216 million per year for a money-losing nearly-useless coin. so, it costs you about a buck per year.
Maybe you should start using cash sometimes. Even if you don't have a direct need to participate in the economy without letting the credit card companies know where you are at several points throughout the day, you probably benefit in indirect ways from the fact that such a thing is still possible.
Your perspective makes sense if you accept as good that massive political effort must be taken to do obviously good things against the wishes of special interest groups. But most people would think that the US Mint churning out worthless coins every year at the expense of citizens is an undesirable state of affairs. Wasting other people’s money is inherently despicable.
Not that worthless coins are anywhere near the top of the list of bad and wasteful policies. But if we can’t even solve the obvious low-hanging fruit, we’re not solving those bigger problems either.
It seems like saying if you won’t bother bending over to pick up a penny, how can anyone expect you to bend over and pick up a one hundred dollar bill - one is worth the effort and one isn’t. People regularly make efforts and propose laws to solve bigger issues - the issue isn’t effort as much as adversarial disagreement.
A system that lets minor inefficiencies endlessly accumulate, because the activation energy to address them is too high, is rotten. As for picking up hundred dollar bills, Congress isn’t solving big problems either.
Hard disagree. The infrastructure act is a clear example of solving big problems.
It’s also neither here nor there - an implication that not solving a really, really small problem says anything about an ability or desire to solve bigger problems is clearly incorrect.
First time I went to the states (some 20 years ago), for some reason or other my local bank gave me a heap of $2 notes (also some $20 and $50 ones!) when I asked them for a few hundred dollars, just so I wouldn't have to worry about finding an ATM accepting my card at SFO.
Didn't realize quite how uncommon they were until I tipped someone a couple of them and they angrily asked me for 'real money'!
Not that I use much cash but I haven't seen a $2 bill in the wild for a great many years. I could see how someone might be suspicious of them (even if only because they suspected they'd have trouble using them).
Maybe it's corruption, but my guess is it's just never been important enough to push through. Imagine all the work that would go into phasing out coins, both politically and logistically... all for what?
It's not corruption. It's what I'll call the interest-group problem.
Pennies are an issue a few people care deeply about and most people don't. It's electorally thrifty to accomodate those few, and so electeds do. It's an easy win, particularly in a partisan environment that punishes consensus building as betrayal of one's base.
Put another way, keeping the penny won't piss anyone off enough to get one primaried. Killing the penny might.
I imagine it would cost less than all the money collectively spent on minting them and buying and maintaining machinery to handle them. Even better if they got rid of the quarter too. But yeah, I can see why no politician has decided to make this their signature issue.
A better idea, in my opinion, is rebasing the currency, to some form of standard like gold - and ceasing to print pretend money, that only results in currency deflation, and retail inflation.
A gold standard would lead to deflation. Noone wants to get an annual 2 to 5 percent paycut while paying interest on a mortgage on a house that goes down in value every year.
You’re going to have to clue me in, to what it would be deflating?! The word is like a decibel, in that it needs some reference marker…
With the currency pegged to a standard, a penny would actually have more value, than it does now.
I disagree on your mortgage point. The whole reason for rebasing to a standard, is to avoid those issues. Where I think the rub is for most people, is they’d have to disavow themselves of the notion, that a property should go up in value.
We can't mine enough gold every year to keep up with the rest of the economy.
To put it another way, if gold was money, there wouldn't be enough new money every year to buy all the stuff we come up in a year.
By decreeing gold to be money and money to be gold, we would be interfering with the market in a major way: artificially giving the value of gold a massive boost and cutting the value of all other things.
It would be too painful for people to have the currency lose all that value at once, but we certainly need to do something. Fiat currency has proven to be a horrible mistake.
Cash transactions were to be rounded to the nearest nickel, whereas cashless transactions were still computed in pennies.
(As far as I can tell, the main reason the US hasn't done the same is due to the prevalance of souvenir penny press machines.)