• Noxy@pawb.social
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    18 hours ago

    even a broken old clock with radium lume that’s flaking off and also somehow is both filled with asbestos AND on fire will coincidentally show the correct time twice a day

      • blackberry@midwest.social
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        21 hours ago

        no. physical currencies have a more complex formula on a good “cost vs use” ratio. it’s usually many years of use to justify spending any amount of resources on a physical currency, otherwise the currency would collapse under its own weight of having to create itself

        • redhorsejacket@lemmy.world
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          14 hours ago

          He’s making an economics joke I believe. Econ 101 was a long time ago, so I could be off the mark here, or misremembering, but I believe money is counted every time it changes hands. Alice buys something from Bob for a nickel, Bob turns right around and purchases something from Alice using that same nickel. The nickel is still only worth 5 cents, but its responsible for 10 cents worth of GDP.

          Or maybe not, and I’m REALLY misremembering econ 101.

    • IzzyScissor@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      Those were alteady technically illegal because defacing money (even a penny) is a felony. Edit: see below comment

      A bunch of them have already swapped out to use penny-sized metal blanks instead.

        • IzzyScissor@lemmy.world
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          20 hours ago

          Oh, interesting, you’re correct. I didn’t realize ‘intent to fraud’ was one of the requirements for it to be a felony. I saw one of the machines that uses the metal slugs and assumed they were all switching over because of that.

  • Snapz@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Remember, when you see these little nothing “wins” it’s just meant to soften you up for a bigger piece of shit you’re about to be forced to swallow. Like when a few of the trump supreme court justices pretend to vote on the side of reason to claim they contain multitudes. They [crying] love beer, boofing in the devil’s triangle, being under his eye, going on billionaire kompromat vacations and dismantling the society you’re trying to care for your family within.

    • Xanza@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      It’s not even a win. Pennies are still necessary because retailers like to use prices like $x.98/99. If retailers made a concerted effort to round up or down to the nearest nickel, it would be a win. But they don’t.

      So now we’re going to have a penny shortage here soon enough for those who like to use cash. Better start hoarding now. You may be able to get $0.05/pennie soon enough.

      • rbesfe@lemmy.ca
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        1 day ago

        The price at checkout just rounds to the nearest nickel by law. Pennies needed to go 10 years ago, it’s been great here

        • Xanza@lemm.ee
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          1 day ago

          There is absolutely zero truth to that statement whatsoever. There are a grand total of zero federal laws which require retailers, or anyone for that matter to round to the nearest nickel… There may be a state or two who do this, and that’s great. But no one is required federally to do it. So saying that it’s “by law” is not only misleading, but it’s a boldface fucking lie.

            • Xanza@lemm.ee
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              1 day ago

              Considering the post he was replying to was about a US President telling the US Treasury to stop minting a specific US currency, OP is beyond stupid.

              • Lasherz12@lemmy.world
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                24 hours ago

                Brother, he’s from Lemmy.ca and is speaking about it like it’s been the case for a while. It’s okay to misread a situation without blaming someone else.

                • Xanza@lemm.ee
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                  23 hours ago

                  So a Canadian makes a statement in a US thread, about a US policy by a US President mistaking the situation and applying logic from a completely different country and passing it off like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, and I’m the bad guy?

                  This place is just as shitty as Reddit sometimes, I guess.

        • Korhaka
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          1 day ago

          For 99% of things I completely agree. But pennies can make for cheaper and better quality bases for some wargame models and also penny pushers at the arcade are pretty fun. Pushing the minimum spend up on those significantly would not be great.

          Overall it is probably still worth it but there are some good things we will lose.

      • Nollij
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        22 hours ago

        It’s called “psychological pricing”, although I’ve always seen the term “just-under pricing”.

        First, it’s not even true that prices are rounded to the nearest cent. Gas is typically priced with an extra 9/10 of a cent. Fractional cents are used in accounting (like compound interest), even if they are discarded in the final results. Places that have done similar still use the small values when processing electronic transactions (credit cards), but don’t collect when paying cash.

        Pricing rules can also easily adjust over time. When it was discontinued, the US half-cent was worth about the same as a modern dime. I could see us getting rid of the penny and nickel (and probably the quarter, since it won’t make sense without a nickel). Prices would then just have a single decimal place, like $9.9 instead of $9.99.

      • Dkarma@lemmy.world
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        24 hours ago

        Yep, the market just lost .04 on every transaction across the board. And how u gonna calculate tax now?

  • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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    2 days ago

    I mean, this is actually valid. Pennies cost more than a penny to make. I don’t think anyone likes pennies. I wish we’d done this a long time ago; it’s not the first time it’s been discussed. First thing I’ve heard of Trump wanting to do that didn’t piss me off, to be honest.

    • adarza@lemmy.ca
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      2 days ago

      he don’t actually care about that. he’d figure some way to make 'em cost even more, so he can take a cut of the action.

      he’s just got a beef with lincoln… for reasons

      but for now, lets just toss this on the pile of things he’s doing or saying without legislative authority.

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        but for now, lets just toss this on the pile of things he’s doing or saying without legislative authority.

        There’s an issue with this in the real world - if enough people ignore legislative authority or some legal mechanism, then it’s not the people who are powerless, it’s the mechanism.

        So - he didn’t do a lot in his first term. But his opposition (the one with power support, popular support alone is not sufficient) shat its pants again, after Obama (who’s been even given a second chance by the populace) with Biden and with the exact way they lost the election.

        He might feel bolder and actually do things outside any formal authority which will materialize.

        • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
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          1 day ago

          Trump also had people organizing for Trump’s second term in a way they hadn’t for the first term. There was no Project 2017 equivalent and the main person with any governing experience around the transition was fired due to a family grudge.

    • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      The last coin to be removed from circulation was the half penny, or hay-penny. At the time they stopped minting it, it had the buying power of 18 cents.

      We could stop minting pennies, nickels, and dimes, all of which cost more than their face value to mint.

      Trump is a fucking moron and a fascist, but rapist clocks are right twice a day.

      Edit: I looked it up, and I was wrong. The dime does not cost more to mint than its face value, but the penny and the nickel do. The dime is still functionally worthless, and could easily be removed from circulation without affecting commerce.

      • celeste@kbin.earth
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        2 days ago

        I had a weird pluto-esque reaction, like, ‘aw, but dimes are my favorite!’ I didn’t even know I had a favorite. Why???

        I think if it’d be more practical to get rid of them, we should.

        • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          Dimes would make a fine choice for the smallest denomination. You could still divide dollars to the nearest tenth of a dollar, which is more than sufficient. They have no buying power by themselves, but a stack can buy something.

          A stack of pennies is still garbage.

          • Klear@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            Sounds a bit too metric to me. The smallest denomination should be 1/12th of a dollar.

      • MothmanDelorian@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        This would only make sense if we only used the coin once. It does not matter that it costs more to mint the coin as they are not single use items.

        What getting rid of small change does is directly harm the less well off.

    • spongebue@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I’m not sure the cost to make vs value is really the best measurement, within reason. At the end of the day society gets a tool to measure a unit of wealth to easily transfer, and there is value in having that.

      That said! Yeah. The US had a half-penny until 1857. I can look at an inflation calculator that only goes back to 1913, and half a penny then was worth 16¢ today. We don’t need the penny anymore.

        • adarza@lemmy.ca
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          2 days ago

          megacorps can’t nickel and dime us if we have no nickels… or dimes… economy fixed!

          can’t give someone your two cents worth if you haven’t got two pennies to give. free speech should obviously cost more than that, anyhow. apparently that price is somewhere between $15 million and $20 billion.

      • halfsak@lemmy.world
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        24 hours ago

        Yeah it’s weird that people just accept what he says that the value is solely in the face value of the currency. If we stick with that method, it’s only a matter of time before trump realizes how much profit he makes by printing a $100 bill.

      • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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        23 hours ago

        Far more? From this article, updated today it says:

        According to the latest annual report from the US Mint, each penny cost 3.7 cents to make, including the 3 cents for production costs, and 0.7 cents per coin for administrative and distribution costs. But each nickel costs 13.8 cents.

        From this it seems pennys are 50% more expensive to make in comparitive value compared to a nickel.

    • mokus@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      2 days ago

      It’s a valid thing we should have done a while ago, but can the president actually just do it? I mean, I know he “can” if people let him but, like, doesn’t that in theory require an act of Congress?

      • Limonene@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        I don’t think he can. If he somehow illegally forces the US Mint to stop making pennies, it doesn’t solve the problem that no law allows stores to just round to the nearest 5 cents. Congress would need to pass that first.

        • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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          2 days ago

          Isn’t this largely on stores to change their prices? It’s not like they’d still be selling things at $0.99 and charging you $1.00, they’d just change their advertised prices to be rounded up to the nearest $0.05.

          That said, you’re probably right in that he can’t just do it.

          • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            With taxes it can be unpredictable as you add multiple items together.

            In Canada they passed a law around rounding when they did this so it’s clear set rules.

            Edit: they also took them out of circulation. They didn’t just stop minting them.

            • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
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              18 hours ago

              No?

              Say there is a tax of x and someone purchases both a and b.

              The total would be:

              total = x * (a + b)
                    = x * a + x * b
              

              As long as all items result in an amount that doesn’t have to be rounded if purchased individually then the combined amount will not have to be rounded either.

              • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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                17 hours ago

                When you do %'s on totals you’ll get something like $11.553

                Which is fine for a single item, they’ll round that down to $11.55 but when you start combining them, you’re off. You don’t round individual items or you can be off by a lot, you round the final one (edit: or maybe they truncate it I don’t know).

                • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
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                  16 hours ago

                  Ah, we’re both right.

                  I assumed that the tax would result in whole numbers but upon further inspection (i.e. trying it out it in a calculator) it turns out that few prices would result in values that don’t have overhanging millidollars.

                  The solution is obviously to force prices to be whole dollar and to further allow sale taxes only in increments of 5%.

    • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Up to three things now I can name that aren’t insane or 100% self-serving:

      • Legislation supporting HBCUs
      • Recognition of the Lumbee Tribe (though some research leads me to think it’s not such a black and white issue – no pun intended)
      • Ending the minting of basically useless pennies

      $85 million is peanuts to the Federal Government, but cash in general is becoming quite outmoded and nobody may even notice if new bills and coins were only minted every other year.

      • snooggums@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Broken clocks and all that.

        Plus there is a decent chance that there is some devious way of implementing each thing to make them negatives instead of the positives they appear to be. Not planned by Trump, but by the people who wrote and put the orders in front of him.

      • justOnePersistentKbinPlease@fedia.io
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        2 days ago

        Canada did it years ago.

        Ends up being a benefit for companies since they ensure that all prices inevitably round up when you use cash.

        Other than that it’s a non issue if you don’t use cash.

        • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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          2 days ago

          Whenever I get pennies (or any change less than a quarter, really, and only then because quarters are useful for vending machines), it goes into the ‘Take a penny, leave a penny’ cup or a tip jar anyway. I use cash rarely enough as it is and I hate having change in my pocket.

      • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        Trump having his own rival currency is the omen of rising inflation. We thought congresspeople holding stocks was bad.

  • Feathercrown@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Let it be known that I’m capable of recognizing a good Trump action, however rare they may be

    • phx@lemmy.ca
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      1 day ago

      Canada did this a long time ago for similar reasons, and many other countries have stopped production of equivalent low-value coins as well.

      Can’t argue with this one.

    • Jericho_Kane@lemmy.org
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      1 day ago

      Makes me wonder what HIS reasoning was tho. Soon we use trump tokens anyway, and we have to start somewhere

      • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        Now he controls two currencies. One administered by a shadowy unelected cabal hellbent on robbing the working class in favor of the investor class… and Trump Coin.