the west made a deal with the devil for cheap plastic trinkets and reaped what it sowed. that's why switching the manufacturing to India won't do any good either.
domestic production or nothing. the "service economy" is a stupid concept.
to my knowledge the legislation only says that the executive branch needs to make the "necessary" amount of pennies. the argument is that because they're losing money literally printing money that the "necessary" amount is zero and that therefore doing this follows the law because zero is an amount.
A better measure, assuming that pennies facilitate value exchange[1], would be whether the cost to mint a penny exceeded the marginal increase in GDP[2] due to having that additional penny available.
[1]: This assumption may not be true; if they're worth so little that people lose track of them, they could actually make it harder to exchange value.
[2]: Making the GDP higher is also a very debatable measure, but I think this generalizes to other dollar-denominated measures of prosperity.
A penny is reused over and over again, every time it changes hands. It’s not necessarily bad that it costs a few cents to make one if it has utility.
It costs more to make a ceramic mug than it does to fill it with coffee. That doesn’t make a ceramic mug uneconomical, because it’s used lots of times and the cost amortizes.
...Having said that, I don’t think there’s actually much value to having an individual token of exchange that signifies as little value as a penny does - it would be a good idea to stop making them even if they cost far less to make than they do.
I agree with you on that - that’s what my last paragraph was trying to convey. I don’t think pennies are necessary, and we are (were) wasting money making them. Nickels and dimes are probably in the same boat.
But I was replying to your reply to a comment which said “I don’t understand why it costing more than face value to mint is such a bad thing” which you antagonistically and derisively called “one of the stupidest comments I have seen on the internet bar none”. It wasn’t a stupid comment.
You're talking like Oxford is some school for shitdogs now.
I went to an unranked school here in Canada for electrical engineering and graduated this year. I did a couple co-ops, won a couple engineering competitions and had my EIT job lined up for me after graduation. Started work a week after classes ended.
On one hand, fair. On the other hand, an MIT or Stanford graduate is more likely to be immediately hired by Google, or NVidia, or Barclays, or something else top-notch, without having to make intermediate career steps.
My perception is that the further you get from the time of graduation, the less it makes a difference where someone went to school. A year or two, I felt like where I got my degree might have made a difference in terms of my ability to find jobs, but coming up on a a decade since I graduated (which is a pretty small portion of what I expect will be a decades-long career), it might as well be entirely irrelevant. Amusingly, I said something similar to one of my colleagues recently when we were discussing the level of stress their teenager was having around their upcoming college applications, and they agreed, mentioning that no one cared that they didn't even have a degree, which was clearly true since I had absolutely no idea that was the case! It never came up in the past despite us chatting fairly regularly about our personal lives because it ultimately just didn't matter to either of us, and while it affected their initial attempts to break into the software industry, it pretty quickly stopped mattering even to their prospective employers compared to their actual work experience.
Obviously there are some industries where degrees are necessary (law, medicine, presumably academia, although I'm not certain), but outside of those, the limiting factors of how far you can go are independent of where you graduated from. There are some places where the initial hiring process will be mostly filtered by where someone graduated, but in the long term, most people will either hit a point of diminishing returns regardless, or they'll be able to make up the difference.
Not true tbh. Tech was the first place where that was the case, but increasingly high-paying professional jobs don't require an undergraduate degree, since its losing its value as an indicator of ability.
Postgrad degrees still have a lot of value, and open a lot of doors. There are things I learned in my Master's that I probably wouldn'tve been able to get at a deep level working in industry, and for that same reason I want to go for a PhD (even if it might be ill-advised in these times).
In California, I've met two people in the last two weeks who live comfortably on their income without a college degree. One of them was in medical sales consulting, the other worked at an art gallery managing the sale of works from the artists they represent to clients. The first started when they were in college and dropped out after their career began to take off, the second was promoted out of an internship.
I think sales in general may also be one of those fields where education is not that important.
That's a fair point: sales has always worked like that. I think there's sales and sales, though. Like, if you're going to be selling high-level stuff, to wealthy and/or sophisticated people, then your background (maybe not always, but generally including, education) really does matter. I don't know, though. I'm not part of that world.
DeepMind and top firms from the City of London have recruiters chasing Oxbridge students in CS, Math, and Statistics before graduation, sometimes even a year or two ahead. You hear more about MIT or Stanford because you are based in the US. Ranking or prestige-wise, in case that matters (I think it's just a lazy filter), they are indistinguishable: https://www.shanghairanking.com/rankings/arwu/2025
My counterpoint is that those companies you listed do more harm than good anyhow. Advertising and data gathering, helping LLM companies train models that use more electricity than many countries, and charging outrageous interest and practicing usury.
Why would you want to work for those places?
Infrastructure projects are where it's at. Pays well and you're using your technical skills to do some good for the country for a change.
You're talking like Oxford is some school for shitdogs now
A rather crude way to express it. But I don't think that pointing out that Oxbridge isn't always a first choice implies, um, "shitdog" status, whatever that is.
I got one lead where the guy gave me the link for good candidates and all the others were useless.