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.
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.
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”)
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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/
cost to manufacture > fiat value of coin > cost of materials
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.