Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

761–770 of 981 posts

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#761

Post by pbhjpbhj »

pxx wrote: post #508
quantified wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the US attempted to transition to the metric system, gas stations raised their prices per unit volume and the American consumer was convinced that the metric system was bad. I have family that think metric is bad because some fringe people thought there should be 10 hours in a day and 100 minutes in an hour, also something like 10 months a year, and the whole thing is bad because some awkward ideas were floated.…

Nobody wants 10 months in a year. What we want is 13 28-day months a year plus one or two intercalary days. But organized religion gets in the way.

Which organised religion is demanding a 10 month year?

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#762

Post by djtango »

pxx wrote: post #508
quantified wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the US attempted to transition to the metric system, gas stations raised their prices per unit volume and the American consumer was convinced that the metric system was bad. I have family that think metric is bad because some fringe people thought there should be 10 hours in a day and 100 minutes in an hour, also something like 10 months a year, and the whole thing is bad because some awkward ideas were floated.…

Nobody wants 10 months in a year. What we want is 13 28-day months a year plus one or two intercalary days. But organized religion gets in the way.

We can revisit our notion of the passage of time when we achieve extra planetary life

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#763

Post by ezfe »

m463 wrote: post #321
ezfe wrote: post #275

Step one: make all items cost an even five cents after tax. step two: when making price adjustments like discount, round the effect to the nearest five cents. Step three: charge everyone this amount

But if 99 cent stuff costs a dollar, sales will plummet.

If they are worried about that then they can make them 95¢

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#764

Post by fastball »

nayuki wrote: post #20

We eliminated pennies in Canada in 2012 and the transition was a non-issue. The vast majority of retailers would round cash transactions to the nearest $0.05, but a few would round down to the nearest $0.05 in favor of the customer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_of_low-denomination... Canadian cash is better than American cash in several ways: No penny, durable polymer banknotes (instead of dirty wrinkly c…

Having $1 bills is so much nicer than having $1 coins. I don't want more coins, thanks.

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#765

Post by J_McQuade »

Absolute bullshit title. The USA has stopped making one-cent coins, and they don't even call them pennies in any meaningful way.

The "last-ever" penny will not be minted until that final coin has been minted by:

The United Kingdom

Gibraltar

Man

St Helena & Ascension Island

Guernsey

The Falklands

and probably a good few of others I've forgotten. Like Jersey.

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#766

Post by tdeck »

connicpu wrote: post #596
hypeatei wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't imagine someone being prosecuted from rounding a penny Under this executive, I wouldn't be so sure. If a grocery chain starts deviating from the law, then the government can use it against them to further a political agenda like we've seen with Eric Adams for example.

The easy thing for stores to do then seems to be apply the cash rounding to EBT and card transactions.

Even easier would be to make a gift to Trump's ballroom or buy into one of his many crypto schemes or Truth Social stock.

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#767

Post by 0_____0 »

sugarpimpdorsey wrote: post #627
0_____0 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you go through coffee regularly, it's actually quite a nice thing to invest in. There are a really amazing number of craft roasters throughout the country, and simply having a quality grinder is enough. And you don't need a crazy espresso setup to enjoy it. My setup consists of a motorized flat burr grinder, a 20$ kettle from target, and a pour over funnel. The quality is so much higher than anything you can get f…

I want a cup of coffee not a science project.

If a gram scale and a grinder that has one knob and one button is too much to deal with then I guess you do need K-cups after all.

300g of water over 17g of freshly ground beans will pretty much always beat the K-cup on quality, is cheaper and produces less waste. You don't even need fancy beans, my go-to is the store brand bean from the supermarket.

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#769

Post by mrguyorama »

quesera wrote: post #749
mrguyorama wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The legal structure of sales taxes in the US present some unique challenges Nothing about sales tax in the US is unique at all. It is not special. It is not hard. It is not a complex problem. It is basically a lookup, and computerized POS systems have managed it just fine since the dawn of computerized POS systems. In fact, when those sales taxes were first implemented, there was problems relating to how to manage s…

> Meanwhile, 48 state governments 48? Are some states particularly dysfunctional? Or are you excluding commonwealths?

I strongly believe that both Texas and California are poorly run and the problem is political but not partisan in nature. I like to leave them out, because both states are the ire of so many people and the brunt of so many arguments

And all of those arguments utterly leave out the other 48 states which vary quite a bit in who runs them and who mostly has power and yet do a pretty good job. There are plenty of conservative states in the US that do a good job of running the government and even representing their people and do not take part in stupid shit for partisan political points and even have rather varied ways of doing things. There are plenty of states run by liberals that are doing very well and are perfectly able to solve numerous problems legislatively following standard legislature procedure and have no problem even compromising across the aisle and listening to varied needs.

When people use Texas or California in their arguments as shorthand to say "D/R can't run a government", they are lying and are too stupid to look around and pay attention to the 48 examples of mostly functional government by both parties with tons of experimentation and programs to pick and choose from.

That is, IMO one of the core issues with why our Federal government struggles so bad. People are failing to look around and notice that 1) Government can function just fine actually 2) We have tons of examples of it 3) Government functioning well doesn't have to be partisan 4) government can easily meet the needs of its people and improve hard problems if you allow them and if you pay attention to it.

It's very relevant to the current thread which is full of people who seem to think this is the first time the US has ever made any change, especially one about removing a coin from circulation, or people who think having a layered sales tax regime is "complicated" despite being solved long ago by every single commodity POS company, or that POS software needs updates to change it's behavior.

Just a lot of people who don't even know the first thing about what they do not know making fairly loud proclamations about things they didn't even realized have been solved forever are insurmountable problems.

Like.... We are humans. We essentially invented math for inventory and tax reasons. We created a system of tamper evident and resistant debt assets out of carved bone and wood sticks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tally_stick

we split the fucking atom

We can fucking remove the penny from circulation.

Re: The last-ever penny will be minted today in Philadelphia

#770

Post by 0_____0 »

skylurk wrote: post #569
0_____0 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you go through coffee regularly, it's actually quite a nice thing to invest in. There are a really amazing number of craft roasters throughout the country, and simply having a quality grinder is enough. And you don't need a crazy espresso setup to enjoy it. My setup consists of a motorized flat burr grinder, a 20$ kettle from target, and a pour over funnel. The quality is so much higher than anything you can get f…

There's some really good hand grinders these days too, minimal effort and only takes a minute.

It can wear on you a bit if you make lots of coffee but I went years with a Hario skerton hand grinder until my partner got sick of it and got us a reasonably priced election burr

Truly you could be making great coffee at home with <$75 of equipment. Gram scale, eBay secondhand conical hand grinder, department store kettle, pourover funnel, filters.

Post reply on HN