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[Maximum Spin]

I really don't get it, you're defending a practice that takes X amount of something, and turns it into something with X/2 amount of face-value and ... you can't see how that's completely wasteful? People take those coins themselves and melt them down for scrap since the scrap exceeds the purchase price. It's the kind of thing you can build organized crime off. (also note there's a large amount of losses - coins that don't come back, for this and other reasons).

Because like I keep telling you, the face value is not the value of production. The government does not make pennies so IT can buy things with them, so pennies are not worth 1¢ to the government, so whether they cost 2¢ to the government to make is irrelevant as long as the value to the government is higher.

There's a problem there.

Pennies are made of a thin copper jacket, surrounding a zinc slug.  Have been since 1982. They are not solid copper.  Smelting them down and recasting them is going to be labor intensive, as you will not get pure metals as a result.

This was done precisely for this very reason; People were getting pennies, then smelting them into copper ingots, then selling the copper.  There was sufficient difference in valuation from raw metal to face-value of currency that this was profitable for people to do.  The Govt was not amused.

Yeah, I know all this, but it's actually not tremendously difficult to shell a penny, that could easily be automated to harvest the materials separately. I mean, people still do it NOW to harvest and sell the copper. (The government is still not amused.)

In unrelated news, I just reskimmed the thread while chatting to friends about the hilarious fight earlier, and, well, let me preface this by saying that I don't usually pay attention to who is saying things. The whole left side of the forum display is outside my attention zone for the most part, so I don't notice at the time who I'm talking to or if I already know that person. As a result, I only just now realised that the guy who A) wanted to eat me and make stuff with my bones, B) wanted to burn my house down, and C) threatened to beat me up if I didn't deny wanting to hysterect immigrants were all the same guy. Congratulations, RedKing, I now hate you personally for being a completely worthless, trash human being nah, that descriptor's too good for you.

[ZBridges]

A) wanted to eat me and make stuff with my bones

That one's truly inspired.  Do you have a link to that post?

[RedKing]

I really don't get it, you're defending a practice that takes X amount of something, and turns it into something with X/2 amount of face-value and ... you can't see how that's completely wasteful? People take those coins themselves and melt them down for scrap since the scrap exceeds the purchase price. It's the kind of thing you can build organized crime off. (also note there's a large amount of losses - coins that don't come back, for this and other reasons).

Because like I keep telling you, the face value is not the value of production. The government does not make pennies so IT can buy things with them, so pennies are not worth 1¢ to the government, so whether they cost 2¢ to the government to make is irrelevant as long as the value to the government is higher.

There's a problem there.

Pennies are made of a thin copper jacket, surrounding a zinc slug.  Have been since 1982. They are not solid copper.  Smelting them down and recasting them is going to be labor intensive, as you will not get pure metals as a result.

This was done precisely for this very reason; People were getting pennies, then smelting them into copper ingots, then selling the copper.  There was sufficient difference in valuation from raw metal to face-value of currency that this was profitable for people to do.  The Govt was not amused.

Yeah, I know all this, but it's actually not tremendously difficult to shell a penny, that could easily be automated to harvest the materials separately. I mean, people still do it NOW to harvest and sell the copper. (The government is still not amused.)

In unrelated news, I just reskimmed the thread while chatting to friends about the hilarious fight earlier, and, well, let me preface this by saying that I don't usually pay attention to who is saying things. The whole left side of the forum display is outside my attention zone for the most part, so I don't notice at the time who I'm talking to or if I already know that person. As a result, I only just now realised that the guy who A) wanted to eat me and make stuff with my bones, B) wanted to burn my house down, and C) threatened to beat me up if I didn't deny wanting to hysterect immigrants were all the same guy. Congratulations, RedKing, I now hate you personally for being a completely worthless, trash human being.

Love you too, fuckwit. I'll be blocking you now so that the thread can resume it's normal level of simmering discontent. And probably taking another long leave of absence from the forums. I was gone 3.5 years last time, hopefully this one won't be as long. But obviously my patience for entitled idiots is razor-thin these days.

[Maximum Spin]

A) wanted to eat me and make stuff with my bones

That one's truly inspired.  Do you have a link to that post?

Spin here claims to be an actual member of the capitalist class, so it's literally a gated world.

So again, future vittles (and tent and knife handle, etc.)
Waste not, want not!

(And in case you missed it in the back-and-forth, let me point out again that I was brought up poorer than him, by a lot.)

[wierd]

I dunno.

here's my philosophy, (and also why I will likely always be poor, and why I am fine with that.)

Money is a means, not an end. (full stop.)


For many people, money becomes an end.  It becomes the reason for their activities, rather than an incidental that moderates their activities.  They forget what actually makes them happy, and makes them actual people, and end up just being agents wholly devoted to the acquisition of largess.  This is especially true of the plutocrat class.  Wealthy-wealthy-wealthy--- but they dont actually use their money for anything other than making more money, and they value the worth of other people based on how much those other people do the same thing.

This is fundamentally wrong.  Once your needs are met, and you are able to enjoy doing things without a sword of Damocles dangling over your damn head (like the eternal damnation of rent and rent seekers, or bills and bill collectors), you do not require any additional money.  There is no reason to hoard or to lie, cheat, swindle, or disenfranchise other people to endlessly seek more and more of it. 

In theory, people who grow up poor learn this lesson.  However, this is not always the case.  Typically, people borne to wealth are given life lessons about how "The world wants to take away all your money, so you have to focus all your energy making more, and if you fail to do that, you have failed as a person." and other similarly destructive life lessons. (which is why most of them are actually bitter old fucks who hate the world, and hate everyone, more often than not, and why the world is the way it is with them in charge of everything.) 

I grew up so poor that we literally had to forage for wild edible plants in the spring and summer, and stock a deep freeze with trash fish for the winter.  I know how to live that way.  It is inconvenient, and I do not relish the idea of returning to that kind of life, but I know how to do it, and am not especially terrified of the prospect.  Money simply affords me the luxury of being able to buy food from the store.  (And, as I did this year to avoid going to the store because of the whole Covid situation, I proved this through demonstration.) I only work to pay taxes, really.  I could live quite nicely otherwise. 

Philosophically, I work to live; I do not live to work.  My value is not based on my GDP, or how much I enrich some property owner with my existence.  As far as I am concerned, the property owners can go get felated by a garbage disposal, especially if they are already wealthy enough that all their needs are met comfortably, and they are just stuck in the "GOTTA MAKE MONEY TO PROVE MUHSELF!" spin cycle. 

It is my opinion that tragedy of the commons can be avoided by properly respecting and living close to that commons.  The more distanced you are from that commons and its maintenance, the more you are prone to abuse it, and thus destroy it, in the name of profit and comfort.  This is true for financial institutions and vehicles just as much as it is for pastures and waterways.

To wit--  My weedy lawn was my pantry for nearly the whole spring and early summer;  The city was not amused, and wanted the weeds gone, because of city ordinances, which exist because of smarmy property owners who get their panties in a twist over appearances and presumptive property values (which out in the boonies, they are kidding themselves into thinking will ever fetch a high price at market in the first place).  They are people caught in the "VALUE! GOTTA INCREASE VALUE!" spincycle, and destroying real value around them. To wit-- killing weeds because they are ugly not only increased my need to go to the store, and thus potentially act as a viral dispersal vector, but also retards habitat for insect species that are in decline, and a number of other actual tragedies of the commons, because "MUH INVESTMENTS!! OH MY!". (which, again, they are in denial about from the start. Properties out here sit on the market for months on average, because there is not much demand for a property that is a 40 minute drive from anyplace with real economic potential.  As long as there is no real physical harm done to their property-- like moles destroying foundations, etc, the paranoia these people have over property values is indicative of the deleterious messages promulgated by the fears of the wealthy rubbing off on them.)


You strike me as the type that has fallen victim to this mindset of the rent seeker.  This is the source of the discord, I believe.  I personally DO in fact, own my own home, and accomplished this feat early in life; this is because I view money as a tool, and not an end in and of itself-- Owning the house outright means I am not obligated to a rent seeker. (namely, a bank as a mortgage holder, or to a landlord, as a pure financial parasite.) This means I am free to do things that I enjoy doing, and not spend all my time worrying about how that rent seeker is going to ruin my life with their rent seeking, because they feel threatened by the market, and the potential reduction in their earning potential.

I hold on to enough liquidity to handle basically any major emergency (at least 2k in the bank at all times), and in so doing, stay above water even though I make less than 20k a year, and thus am considered impoverished.

Because of these kinds of behaviors, I live "more wealthy" than most people, even rich people.  However, the wealthy consider me to be a substantial waste, because I do not willingly give my time, energy, or talents to their enterprises.  The rent-seeking class despises people like me, because we do not die easily, and choke up their plans to further enrich themselves eternally, just by existing and living the way we do.  History is replete with this. (Just check out the Pinkertons for some historical precedent.)

There's a message in the modern world, aimed at poor people like me, that makes the destitute.  "YOU NEED THIS RANDOM TRINKET! YOU ARE NOTHING WITHOUT IT! BUY NAME BRAND! SOCIAL STANDING IS KING! CONSUME! LABOR, TOIL, SLAVE! TAKE ON DEBT, IT'S NECESSARY AND GOOD-- YOU TOO CAN CLIMB THE LADDER TO RICHES! YOUR VALUE TO SOCIETY IS BASED ON YOUR NET WORTH, SO SACRIFICE EVERYTHING IN THE NAME OF LARGESS!"

You end up with poor people who spend all their time dodging police, acting as the agency of rich rent seekers seeking to prevent any perception of loss of their property values (and those dirty poor people might soil things by breathing!), and who seek to squeeze for every drop they can get, while extracting "Maximal value" from employing said people-- such that those people have zero free time to improve themselves with, or to self-actualize and be full, whole human beings with.  The rent seekers content themselves that the poor people should just magic time and resources into existence to better themselves, and that their failure to comply is some affirmation of how much better people the affluent are than the poor, rather than the blindingly obvious proof of the inverse that it is.

People trapped in decaying city centers, where only slumlords own property, who refuse to invest in improvements (because it does not profit them), and demand extortionate rents for terrible living conditions, on people who lack the financial liquidity to escape the hell they were born into, all the while such people slave and toil at the lowest wages allowed by law, because "they should be HAPPY to even GET a job from me!" types have drunk the "Your value is based on your networth" koolaid.

Getting people into that position is the end-goal of the rent-seeking class, because the people are so hamstrung that they cant throw the parasites off, and are easily destroyed financially, because they dont own anything, and thus cannot challenge any new hair brained "GET EVEN RICHER" scheme they can dream up.  They just get evicted, and get expected to die quietly and quickly.


I would instead suggest that more poor people should be like me-- a natural obstacle to that kind of largess seeking, both philosophically, and materially. The world would be in a much more sustainable and livable state if it were so. 

There is nothing wrong with being a property owner; I happen to be one myself.  However, do not join the rent seeking class, and do not drink their koolaid.  It's poison.

[Maximum Spin]

You strike me as the type that has fallen victim to this mindset of the rent seeker.  This is the source of the discord, I believe.

Who are you talking to here? Because if it's me, man, you are way off. I mentioned earlier that I don't even work. I would be perfectly happy to do nothing more than farm my land for personal use forever. This, incidentally, is also why I think property taxes are terrible: they buy into this assumption that land has to be productive, and if you're not making enough money from it, we'll just take it and give it to someone (some corporation) that will.
This is also why I uniquely despise fuckfaces who think they're entitled to (metaphorically or literally) farm my land or make me farm it for them, because I've made choices in my life that let me do this and they haven't.

In fact, as I've said many times, I'm extremely happy and content in my day-to-day life and never feel like I don't have enough stuff or anything like that. I've never felt that for one minute of my life.

[delphonso]

Well said, wierd. Not to piggy-back, but I might have some extra info on the renter class, especially those leaving university.

I live and work in China. Partially, that's because my earning potential is far greater here, meaning I can afford to travel (when that existed) and provide support for friends and family when they need it. I have been out of work since February and am still pretty comfortable because I don't spend much (I've got a kid coming in October, and should still be okay for a bit.)

I don't spend much because, like wierd, I once lived with nothing. Foraging in the city was more theft but we also gathered berries and edible greens from the patches of green between our neighborhood and the new developments coming in around it. But most of my memories are me and my sister stealing copper wiring from construction sites.

But moreso, my habits and hobbies are cheap. I read and play the same 10 video games all the time. Probably my biggest expense is a gym membership. I see expensive clothes as a waste, nice cars as a sign of stupidity. I have a small debt in the US, because Wisconsin defunded their universities when I was studying, and tuition rates jumped up unexpectedly.

I come across a lot of new arrivals to China from the US or Europe. Many straight out of university. Almost all of them have expendible income for the first time in their lives. Food and rent are cheap here, and the salaries for foreigners are generous. So I've known a lot of people who have always lived paycheck to paycheck and suddenly don't have to. Most people follow a similar cycle:

With an excess of funds and no rent-seekers breathing down their neck, they spend everything they have. Expensive beers and food, "import" clothes (they're all made here anyway), much more expensive apartments than necessary. Even hiring nannies and cleaners - services you'd never dream of in the US. For the first few months they sort of go wild. Then there's a shift.

Either, they settle into the comfort of the middle class, save a bit and start looking at future plans. They become content and start to use money as a means. Or they continue that high-waste life style and become easily motivated by money. I have even seen predatory English schools encourage the latter in their teachers because you can squeeze more labor from them.

Whether this agrees with wierd's statements or not, I feel it's symptomatic of those upper-lower class or lower-middle class individuals who achieve stability and how easily that can turn someone to either greedy or content. This sort of thing happens much more in cities, where you're more likely to see a dramatic change in status in either direction.

The expat example is also not an option for everyone - it is heavily favoring White folks, and is unlikely to be emotionally possible for those who have a strong family unit.

[Starver]

Checking current exchange-rates[1], your smallest bill of $1 is equiv to £0.77, with our largest (commonly circulated[2]) coin being £2 ($2.58, so call it a deca-quarter). We still have our pennies (cupro-nickel plating on ¿steel[3]?) although one political party wants to replace them with 99p coins, to reduce our need for the pennies in our change.

With polymer notes now for £5, £10, £20 (for at least half of our issuing banks), and £50 staggering into that production across GB&NI, maybe they're hardy enough to last much longer than our old cotton-paper ones (I know the aussies have longer experience, but we don't tend to do quite as much surfing). They do tend to 'spring' out of an unguarded pocket, so longevity may go up in the environment (more likely to be picked up than a crisp(/chip)-packet!), but they seem to be more prone to 'evaporate' from the clutches of their erstwhile possessors in various non-transactional ways.

...which, for some reason, I thought you'd like to know, here in Ameripol.



[1] Expecting those to change drastically, lby the end of the year, one way or another, unless falling off the next significant Brexit cliff is somehow matched closely in the markets by the fall-out of Nov 3rd...

[2] Often found in my pocket, even multiple times in one 'jangle'.

[3] It's magnetic, as with the 2p coins, where pre-change small-change (mid '90s[4]) were not. And I would remember if they were actually nickel (or pure iron, or cobolt, before getting into the more exotic mixes). My metallurgist father is probably shouting down at me that there's all kinds of steel (body-centred, face-centered, austenitic, martensitic, etc) but it doesn't matter too much at this point, so I'm not sure why you're so curious and asking me to explain all these minutiae..

[4] Half remembered, without looking it up or getting a magnet (or just looking, as there's non-subtle visual differences, perhaps due to how they respectively wear and tarnish) and checking a sample of pennies spread from 1971 upwards that are almost within reach as I type.

[McTraveller]

I think you guys are confusing the face value of a piece of currency with the value society derives from having currency with that face value.

Apparently there are arguments that the value to society of having pennies may in fact be greater than $0.02 per penny. Thus society has a net benefit from producing them, even when the cost to produce one is higher than the face value.

I don't have enough information to verify such a statement.

I'm opposed to getting rid of pennies for two main reasons: The first is the shift to "all digital" is seriously regressive, because if you don't have digital infrastructure it basically means you can no longer participate or you have limited participation.  I guarantee the cost of providing digital access to funds across all society is far greater than the cost of minting coins and printing bills.   Related to this is that if you have a digital system that does not round prices, but a physical system that does, you can bet your literal dollar that prices will be set such that they round up more than they round down and this will cost the physical-only payers a small amount that will contribute to systematic inequality*.

Spoiler: *The simple math (click to show/hide)

Stores know the distribution of how many items are purchased in each transaction. You can set the last digit of the price of your products to maximize round-up effect. At a store where people buy 5 or fewer items in a transaction, just price things at $x.x9 and you will win the round-up effect every time.  Hell if the most common transaction is one item, set your prices at $x.x6 and you will gain $0.04 due to round up on every sale!  Consider convenience stores, etc. where transactions are one or two items at most and see how this will disproportionately affect certain populations.

[Reelya]

> if the most common transaction is one item, set your prices at $x.x6 and you will gain $0.04

It's rounded to the nearest 5 cents if you remove pennies. anything ending in a 6 gets rounded down. You're right that that rounding would work if they also got rid of nickels. Although, 5 gets rounded up too, so they could set prices ending in 95 cents. However ... there's actually no incentive for businesses to do that.

First, if the old price was 99 cents but you changed it to 95 cents to exploit 'rounding up' for people who pay by cash haven't you just lost 4 cents on every sale that uses a card? Plus if the person buys two of them, now that's 190, so you lost 5 cents on each unit. So, if you remove both pennies and nickels, prices will still stick at 99 cents. That's because if every item is 99 cents then you need to buy a lot of them to get to the point where they're rounding down.

As for the disproportinately hurting the poor thing: how many transactions does the average poor person make per week where they end in a 99? Logically: not that many. Say they buy one thing worth 99 cents with cash every single say (highly unlikely), so they're hard hit by the rounding up. In a whole year, they're out of pocket exactly $3.65. But note that it's actually a highly unrealistic scenario that they'd have a transaction of this type every single day. if prices end in 99 and they round to the nearest 10 cents you only need to put things through in transactions of 6 items and you've almost doubled the amount of changed you'd normally get, so if they merely bought their stuff weekly then they'd get twice the change they're getting anyway.

Plenty of nations have already abandoned pennies, and the net effect was no fucking difference at all, apparently: other than saving money on the government not throwing money away producing crap nobody wants. For example most people wouldn't stoop to pick up a penny: even on minimum wage if you spend all day bending over to pick up pennies, you'd make less money than your wage per hour. You'd have to pick up a penny every 5 seconds to equal federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. So even if there were pennies littered everywhere on the ground it wouldn't be worth the time of even the poorest American to collect them.

At this point they're not facilitating anything, their mere existence is actually a hindrance to commerce.

EDIT: and the key point about the rounding thing is that you could, if you wanted to, go through a self-serve checkout and you can group the items however you want. So if you're buying 20 things at the supermarket, you can do the self-serve and strategically make the rounding work for you, and the business can't say a fucking thing. Nobody bothers with this however, because fucking around for 10 minutes to save 2 cents isn't actually worth anybody's time, even for the poorest people.

[McTraveller]

Ok fair point about stores not wanting to lose money on the digital sales, so wouldn't want to drop prices.  And the round to nearest $0.05 instead of "round up" rules only slightly changes the math.  Basically any item priced at $x.x9 will cost cash-only people.

And nobody (well, for statistical values of nobody) is going to sit there and group their items to make sure the price ends in 0,1,2,5,6,7 to save themselves money. They are just going to do what they always do.  And for things that hit the people most likely to pay cash - like at convenience stores, they are going to be buying ones- or twos, so $x.x9 will ding them every time.  Yeah it's small, but it's a systemic bias.  And also consider those people don't typically have the education to know they are getting dinged... yeah.

And the government spending $100M (or even $1,000M) on coinage is trivial in a $3,000,000M budget.  You need to look at line items of $10B or more to even be worth the time, to be honest.  This is one of those foolish arguments that uses "let's save millions" because million sounds big, but you'd have to have a thousand such initiatives to make any kind of notable impact on government spending.  Pareto rule and all that.

[Starver]

When the UK dropped its ha'pennies (½p, £0.005) from circulation, shops just didn't continue to sell things at (say) 19½p on the basis that a single purchase would require the shopper to hand over 20p and gain the shop a(n extra) profit. Prices either went up to 20p (making it official) or down to 19p (if that minor cut in margin was acceptable). The very last things I remember 'costing' a price with ½p in it was aniseed balls, where they had been ½p each, and were still listed as such but were effectively two-for-a-penny.

Now, I'm aware that the practice, pre-€, in several European countries with fiddly/nonexistant 'small change' was more laissez faire with either a 'that'll do' attitude by both shop and customer in getting close to the theoretical transaction (each to lose/gain on the swings, gain/lose on the roundabouts) or have a substitute fiat currency (individual matchsticks, small sweeties) to 'make up' any transactional change. I've heard of friends have this happen to them in Spain, Italy (with... what was it... 2000£ira to the GB£?), though I never had issues the couple of times I was in Italy, prices just seemed to be doable with whatever coins and notes I had (or could get back), perhaps more geared up to directly fleecing the English tourist where I was[1]. Because we tend not to haggle[2], don't 'do' tips[3] and certainly in anonymous retail situations[4] we absolutely do not forgive 'fiddling change' errors.

I think in Denmark (at that time having a 5øre coin as the fiddlingest small coin in use) they just had roundings to the 0.05kr. level for everything, being scandinavian not mediterranean in every way. They must have had a centile coin at one point (as we in the UK had 240th-, 480th- and 960th-of-a-pound coinage in the past, and others), but not by the time I was there. Can't recall the Franc (~10/£?), or rather how far it went with centimes. Probably med-rules, if necessary? But there'd been a revalue. Turkish £ira is probably the one I could ask someone I know for a relatively recent experience of, though.


The point I intended making, before I diverted round the (nearby) world a bit, is that the US could probably drop the ¢ and then..? I would say you'd probably just go to $.95 marks. Psychologically, any leeway not ready given to imprecision (complicated by your system of having to add various Sales Taxes to a 'listed' price, rather than our VAT which is always included, the exVAT price additionally listed at places with a significant business-supply footfall - and thenbyour tipping system(s) where that applies) won't be added to in your particularly capitalist environment.

BICBW



[1] Though the mark-up on cans of coke, that time I walked round Mt. Blanc was probably ordinary 'last shop before the long walk over the pass into Switzerland' inflation, or whatever the situation was again, with something like two cans for what was perhaps a whole pound (a bargain, at today's UK prices) dictated to be supply and demand as well.

[2] My mother had to be 'taught' how to haggle by an old woman in a Berlin Flohmarkt (or was it Fliegen..?) who had some beads my mother was interested in but not at the first quoted price... And all through me, as a most inexpert translator.

[3] We like to think people are already paid for the job they do, or ask the right amount for their service, without having to guess what arbitrary amount of overpayment to offer (without knowing if it goes to the one person we might have been impressed by) and find arbitrary largess 'vulgar', unless we're totally rich enough to afford to be arbitrarily vulgar.

[4] Might be different in your local village store, where a remembered debt in either direction doesn't exceed a magnitude that ties straight into friendship and proven community-mindedness. I've even had an offer to 'putbit on my slate' at a pizza place I frequented once, though I still insisted I would run half a mile and back to the nearest cash machine to correct the monetary oversight I'd placed myself in when leaving the house in a new pair of trousers only partially repopulated from the pockets of the old.

[Egan_BW]

Yo, that's a good post up there ☝️

[sluissa]

Reminescing more than anything, but much as I hate shopping. And would probably hate haggling on a daily basis. It was a fun experience in the Bahamas. Went on a trip there. First person I meet after stepping off the dock was a lady selling beaded necklaces. She was offering them 2 for $20. Which we passed up, but she stopped us and informed us of how things worked there. Gave us a little crash course on haggling, and we walked away with 3 necklaces for $15. Probably still way overpriced, given they seemed to either mass produced or made of partially imported materials. But it was a fun experience and at least let us know how to handle the rest of the trip. I still have that necklace I kept of the three. It truely was a nice souvenir and well worth the $5 in my opinion.

And again, all that said, I like being able to go to the store, scan an item, pay what it says, and leave with minimum interaction. For day to day purchases, that's preferred. And having spent some time in Canada where they got rid of single cents. Rounding to nickels is so much better. Dimes would probably be even better, but pennies need to go either way.

[Dostoevsky]

Actual examples!

Hey now, you know the U.S. can't make any policies based on what *shudder* Europe does.

Edit: Now that I think about it further, gas stations here in the D.C. area already list their price as XX.XX+9/10, i.e. with an extra 0.9 cents. And that hasn't really caused many problems for them.