What This Country Needs is an 18¢ Piece (2002) [pdf](cs.uwaterloo.ca) |
What This Country Needs is an 18¢ Piece (2002) [pdf](cs.uwaterloo.ca) |
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.
> 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.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-s-penny-withdrawal-all...
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.
It's quite easy to pass laws that no one cares about. Congress passed a law modernizing duck hunting permits. Maine was very happy.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc_mining_in_the_United_Stat...
The only reason it wasn't already abolished is lobbying by Zinc producers.
It's the zinc lobby [1]. Maybe the solution is to mint a zinc quarter?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_for_Common_Cents
coinnews.net/2022/01/18/penny-costs-2-1-cents-to-make-in-2021-nickel-costs-8-52-cents-us-mint-realizes-381-2m-in-seigniorage/
It's worth keeping cash around.
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.
Keep the 50 cent and $1 pieces though. And $2 bills. I LOVE handing those to people who don't realize they are real.
Didn't realize quite how uncommon they were until I tipped someone a couple of them and they angrily asked me for 'real money'!
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'd argue politics in this country is angry and seems to lack respect for opposing political stances. I found the parent's post perfectly adequate
This is true for issues with national currency. Pennies aren't in this category. Instead, it's more subject to the interest-group problem [1].
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.
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.
That's literally deflation.
I already get annual pay cuts thanks to inflation.
(Even gunmetal which used to be used instead of steel is listed as only 2-4% zinc)
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.
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.
I don't know why the US is uniquely(?) in this stasis around the denomination of money in circulation. Of course, at this point, it's pretty academic.
Pennies should have been gone decades ago. And it's still hit or miss to use anything above a $20 especially in a smaller store.
This is also true of pennies.
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.)
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.
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.
Since it also features Lincoln, the Illinois contingent will also cling to it for dear life.
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.
"In 2011 the Royal Canadian Mint had minted 1.1 billion pennies, more than doubling the 2010 production number of 486.2 million pennies.
...
The budget announcement eliminating the penny cited the cost of producing it at 1.6 cents."
--
The announcement of the penny's removal may have been timed, but its removal was sensible, long coming, discussed for more than a decade, and needed.
Minting a billion pennies a year, many of them lost, or hoarded, was senseless.
So now we're centless.
Similarly, sales taxes often result in a fractional penny as well, which again gets floor() or bankers_rounding().
(except for pennies though. I guess that is one kind of change we love...)
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.
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.
But there's probably some killjoy law that makes this illegal.
Two out of four isn’t much less impressive though.
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.
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.
2 farthings = 1 halfpenny
2 halfpence = 1 penny (1d)
3 pence = 1 thruppence (3d)
6 pence = 1 sixpence (a 'tanner') (6d)
12 pence = 1 shilling (a bob) (1s) 2 shillings = 1 florin ( a 'two bob bit') (2s)
2 farthings = 1 halfpenny
2 halfpence = 1 penny (1d)
3 pence = 1 thruppence (3d)
6 pence = 1 sixpence (a 'tanner') (6d)
12 pence = 1 shilling (a bob) (1s)
2 shillings = 1 florin ( a 'two bob bit') (2s)
2 shillings and 6 pence = 1 half crown (2s 6d)
5 shillings = 1 Crown (5s) 2 shillings and 6 pence = 1 half crown (2s 6d)
5 shillings = 1 Crown (5s)
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.
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.)
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.
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!
[1]: https://alexmohr.com/papers/dht-postage-stamp-podc2005-exten...
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.)
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.
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.
Inflation targets will ensure coins are worthless soon enough tho. I'm a fan that governments can't impose these targets on crypto.
What This Country Needs Is an 18¢ Piece [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14579635 - June 2017 (45 comments)
What the U.S. needs is an 18-cent coin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3985299 - May 2012 (28 comments)
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?
What if we just up the nickel from 5¢ to 6¢?
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.
And if Terry Pratchett is to be believed, it was a much worse mess that that.
It very much was not a duodecimal (powers of 12) system.
1 Farthing (f)
1 half-penny = 2f
1 penny (d) [0] = 4f
1 threepence = 3d = 12f
1 sixpence = 6d = 24f
1 shilling (s) = 12d = 48f
1 crown = 5s = 60d = 240f
1 mark = 13s 4d = 160d = 640f (this was purely a unit of account, and not used after about the 18th C)
1 pound (£) = 20s = 240d = 960f
1 guinea = 1£ 1s = 21s = 260d = 1040f
[0] (d) from "denarius", the Roman coin that was the antecedent of the silver penny.
As the paper admits, this is a bad assumption. Curious to see the number given actual price data.
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.
* (“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”)
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.
wget "https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~shallit/Papers/change2.ps"
pkfix change2.ps change2-fixed.ps
ps2pdf change2-fixed.ps
Side-by-side: https://shreevatsa.net/post/pkfix/ (Barebones post with screenshot as I need to go now; will add more details later today.)
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.
https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/48369/are-the-origin...
It works like this: give dimes for change, they're the best coin (highest value density).
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."
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/argentina-inflation-end-210-s...
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1c1g96/comment/c9c6ll...
If you’re actually new to it - it’s a fun read!
The full threads:
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/17x0d5/friends_of_min... https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1c1g96/60_some_thousa...
Thanks for the correction :-P
Also, roll your coins and take them to a bank or, better yet, donate them; don’t make tellers count all your trash coins.
> Britiany Peel & Stick Floral Roll by Canora Grey
> From$1.20/sq. ft.
https://www.ehd.org/science_technology_largenumbers.php
> 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:
https://oboi-store.ru/catalog/bumazhnye
> JB80201 Обои KT Exclusive Jelly Beans
> 10.05х0.53м
> 10 500 руб/рул.
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.
Yes, I did a digital clock, too, my first digital design/build. It never did work right.
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.
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
My full outstretch (wingspan) is around 2m.
Celsius doesn’t work well for human temperature. In America, air conditioning is common. Even poor people have air conditioning and often use it.
https://tradingeconomics.com/spain/inflation-cpi
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.
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.
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.
But you dumping your piggy bank onto the counter and making everyone else in line wait for you, all because you can't be bothered to roll them ...
I found US sales tax baffling - I live somewhere that requires the display price to be the out-of-pocket amount.
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.
I've never heard anyone say that
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".
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)
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.
And if you pay with your debit card then it's still €0.99.
€2.97 will net you 2 whole cents if you pay €3 in cash and get a five cent coin back.
It's legal:
https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/geldzaken/vraag-en-...
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-...
It's been discussed by policitians in Britain, but as far as I know there are no plans to introduce it.
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).
I have never seen anywhere that advertised the tax rates at a store when I've visited the US.
Taxes being different, not baked in, and not advertised just makes the whole system appear random.
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.
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.
Pennies and nickels definitely should go. They’re not even worth picking up off the ground.
Swedish coin, year taken out of circulation:
0.1 cents, 1972
0.2 cents, 1972
0.5 cents, 1985
1 cent (penny), 1992
2.5 cents, 1985
5 cents (nickel), 2010In 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..."
The sender can elect to round them to the nearest crown, but that is optional.
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]
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 :)
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.
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.
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].
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/why-nyse-switch-fra...
[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. ]