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This reminds of Book Off, Japan's biggest used book store. They use special machines to slightly shave off edges of books[0], so that the books appear newer. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_Off#Operations
This reminds of Book Off, Japan's biggest used book store. They use special machines to slightly shave off edges of books[0], so that the books appear newer. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_Off#Operations
That trick with the edges is a pretty good value add, since a lot of people don't really care about the actual age or history of the book, they just want their bookshelves to appear neat.
Along with the coins, the burnisher is filled with water, bird shot to knock the dirt off, and a healthy pour of 20 Mule Team Borax soap Isn't bird shot typically made from lead? Are they coating the coins with lead?
"Bird shot" is the size of the steal abrasive. Ridiculous to think they open up shotgun shells and pour in the projectiles.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, pretty much equal frequency. I think the rule is usually round up $x.x3, but round down $0.08. But there will be more 3s than 8s: Benford’s Law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law
This makes 0 sense. Firstly, if you're rounding to the nearest 5c, you can round up both $x.x3 and $x.x8, and get fair rounding. Perhaps you are thinking of the slightly more complicated deal with rounding to the nearest 10c, where you round down $x.05 and up $x.15. And Benford's law applies to leading digits, not the least significant digit. It's right there in the first line of your link.
But Benford's law extends to less significant digits, just decreasingly so. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law#Generalization... That's why the link says "leading digits", not "most significant digit".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Several countries don't have a 0.01 coin, so they have rounding when making a cash payment. Here in Denmark, where the smallest coin is 0.50kr, and a single bag of sugar is 9.95kr, I'll pay 10kr at the till. If I buy 6 bags of sugar, which is 59.70kr, then in cash I'd pay 59.50kr. When paying by card, the exact amount is paid. For the USA, a reasonable first step would be rounding to the nearest 5¢. Someone so poor t…
When I was a kid, I remember going to a small hobby store to buy a couple of bottles of paint. The bottles were $0.25 each, and I had exactly $0.50. I took my bottles to the register and was told the total was $0.51, because of sales tax. So I only purchased one bottle, and the total was $0.25. As I was leaving I realized that the tax had been wiped out, so I went back in and purchased the second bottle for $0.25 too…
Change doesn't make sense today. Comparing the value of a penny in 1900 it would be worth $0.31 today. Therefore we should get rid of pennies, nickles, and dimes. It is a huge waste of human time to count these small denominations out. They should round up to the nearest $0.25 https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1900?amount=0.01
He might be one of the only professional money-washers left at a private business, but some of the people who rank very highly on the currency tracking site www.wheresgeorge.com are known to wash, dry, and iron hundreds to thousands of paper banknotes every day. Wattsburg Gary, one of the sites top ranked users attributes his high "hit rate" to this practice which is about as straightforward as it sounds. He runs the…
This reminds of Book Off, Japan's biggest used book store. They use special machines to slightly shave off edges of books[0], so that the books appear newer. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_Off#Operations
How does a chain of second hand bookshops succeed in this day and age? Is it because manga are more like magazines in size and regularity of purchase than novels? I'd love it if there was something like that in my country.
In general I think there are three main reasons for their success: 1) Price - older books are dirt cheap in Book Off. You can get artbooks, drawing books, manga, fiction, non fictin, even games, cds, dvds for often fifth of the price or even elss. A manga volume that sold for 600 yen will be there for 100 yen for example. Also, you could get even really rare books sometimes, that would cost much more than even their original price on ebay and other auction sites.
2) Japanese still use a lot of physical media. You will still encounter shops full of DVDs, bluerays, music CDs, console and game software on physical media. You don't really see that very often in the west anymore. So that likely translates to books. I am not really sure about the reasons for this - could be an interesting study. :)
3) Like for many things, there is a complete lifecycle for books in Japan. You can buy a new buy while knowing that when you finish reading it you can sell it to Book Off or similar used book chain, tobrecover part of the cost. Then you can buy a new book, rinse and repeat. Could be even related to japanese flats being in general pretty small, so people in Japan might be more inclined to sell books once they are done with them to save space.
This book lifecycle is something I'm really missing here in Europe. You buy a book, read it to the end and then what? There are small "old book" shops, but they mostly have pretty expensive rare old books and seems to be pretty snobbish about what they accept. No way they would accept your one year old SF book you just finished reading, so that someone else can enjoy it while you buy a new one for effectively less.
AFAIK people work around this by selling books via social networks, but this really doesn't come close. Nothing beats comming to Book Off, unloading a bunch of read books for some money and then just browsing for all the gems hidden on the endless shelves. I've ligerarly bought many tens of killograms of books from Book Off. Thannfully, the airline (Alitalia) allows 2 x 23 kg luggage per person, otherwise I would have been rather screwed. :D
Change doesn't make sense today. Comparing the value of a penny in 1900 it would be worth $0.31 today. Therefore we should get rid of pennies, nickles, and dimes. It is a huge waste of human time to count these small denominations out. They should round up to the nearest $0.25 https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1900?amount=0.01
Yes it totally doesn't make sense. The coins are worth so little now. Also making pennies adds $2m a year to our trade deficit with China.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Each item rounds up. If you shop for food at the dollar-ish store, $1.01 now goes to $1.25. A 14 to 24% price increase that will disproportionately affect lower socioeconomic people. As someone who lived not so long ago when literally saving a dime mattered, no thank you.
If you’re comfortable with not being precise to half pennies or $0.001, then there is likely a unit that you feel is equitable to round to, and the question is what unit that should be. As rounding will favor you as often as it works against you (assuming it’s not heavily gamed), there should be a unit that people trait as fair. As that choice has remained the same regardless of inflation, it might be fair to say we…