Where the gasoline is a neat 9.449$ per gallon.

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And the "driving on the freeway on a scooter" analogy still holds true because the pilots are sitting in 7 to 30 ton aircraft o' doom and you are running around them in your very own Meatbody, Mark I. Beep, beep.
Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

Bills? Coins? Who needs them?

My integrated bank card/cash card pretty much works every where I go.
(And it's fast.)
Even the fast-food delivery guy has a mobile terminal.

In '99 I bought a PC at a trade show, and paid with my card.
And used my cell phone to transfer funds from my savings to my spending account.

At the time I thought that it felt positively science fictional.

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Join the Illuminati

"I'm lookin' for pound notes, loose change, bad cheques, anything. Gimme some money!" - Spinal Tap.

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In Fallout 3, 'happiness' is a warm junkyard dog and a loaded gun. It's mostly the loaded gun.
- Moose's one-line review.

"your going to regret that one. You are now a colonoscope...
- Chrissy, corrupting PraedSt's wish.

Heh, after a semester in Berlin, I had a whole bowl full of 1 and 2 cent coins. Maybe it was just a habit of ignoring them, but even when I would get 5 cents in change, it'd be in two 2-cents and one 1-cent coin. Very irritating.

I guess it was a habit. I think you didn't like them and so you did not bother to carry them around and spend them. You maybe always put them in that bowl when coming back home.

BTW: Getting back 5 cents in 2 cent and 1 cent coins is really strange.

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Andre

"They did not know it was impossible, so they did it!"
Mark Twain

I used to collect them in a piggybank and carry them to the bank once a year for their automated coin machines.

Here in Sweden, they automatically round up or down to SEK.50. I think they have to round to nearest, so there's no such thing as one store rounding up and the other down. And it always evens out, in the end.
But since most people nowadays don't use cash anymore, it ceased being a problem (except for vending machines, who don't accept .50 resp. 5 cent either, that's just plain stupid).

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[Foot mouth in put]
Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.

Andre, would you like to see my wallet?
Lots of red coins!!
Its funny, usually they are spend as fast as you get them, usually...
But the last week I just could not get rid of them.
Possibly I will drop them in my daughters piggybank.

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"Who does not know anything, must believe everything."
Baroness Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach 1830-1916

I was in Italy recently and people in shops normally rounded things off to the nearest 5c. Though they accepted the smaller coins (I had collected a large number in Ireland) when I spent them.

In Britain we converted to the present decimal coinage in Feb 1971. At that time the smallest coin was the halfpenny (usually pronounced harfpee). This was worth 2.4 times the previous coin of smallest value, the old halfpenny (pronounced haipny). The 1/2p was taken out of circulation in 1984, by which time its value had fallen by about a fifth. Perhaps we should have followed Portugal, which left in circulation a 2.5 Escudo coin, withdrawing the 1 and 2.

Since 1971 general inflation has increased prices by a factor of just over 10. So today the 5p piece is worth about the same as the 1/2p was when it was introduced. It would be a good time to take our "coppers" out of circulation.

There is a good reason the US keeps paper dollars. This is because the currency is substantially used in many other countries, but only the paper bills. The US makes profit in having all this issued money in use. Since a dollar is quite a chunk of money in a poor country, the wage of a day's labour, it would be disadvantageous to the US to have all this money taken out of circulation.

Though you could have a dual system, as they do in Scotland, where Scottish pound notes remain in circulation alongside pound and two-pound coins. I do wish we had had the foresight to make these coins thinner and lighter.

I was quite upset when the English pound note went out of circulation, as it had a picture of Isaac Newton on it. The note was only issued for 5 years, until the pound coin was introduced. I wish they'd had the foresight to put him on a larger note. Though we do currently have Darwin on the £10, probably to annoy a certain type of American tourist. And people of a certain political persuasion may not like using the new £20 with Adam Smith on it.

I just checked:

3 x 2 Euro coin
2 x 1 Euro coin
2 x 50 cent coin
1 x 10 cent coin

not a single red coin. Somehow I seem to be different.

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Andre

"They did not know it was impossible, so they did it!"
Mark Twain

43ct in 1ct and 2ct...

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"Who does not know anything, must believe everything."
Baroness Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach 1830-1916

I have one 1 ct. in my pocket but that's because I just spent 7.14 at the grocery and made up the .14 entirely out of 1 & 2 cent pieces. Usually if I'm going to get some .1 or .2 amount in change I just tell the clerk to keep it. It wouldn't bother me if they were to go away.

ALSO, having recently been to Britain - why the heck are the 2p coins so big? I thought they were 2 pounds at first!

- J

Because they were made the same size as the pre-1971 1/2d coin (d indicates old pennies, 240 to the pound), to make it easier for slot machine companies to convert their slot machines to the new coinage. Since the new 1p coin was half the weight, and thus the same weight as an old farthing, our smallest coin which had been withdrawn in 1960, anything smaller would have been judged too small by the public. At the time, used to our enormous old coins, they seemed rather small to us. We are lucky they didn't model it on the old 1d, which was twice the weight, and 31mm across. In fact the new 50p which soon seemed so huge had a slightly smaller diameter (30mm). In 1971, 2p was worth the same as about 21p today, so it was a material amount of money when rising real wages are taken into account. A child fare on a London bus, even a few years later, was 2p or 3p, depending on distance, and adult fares (which I had to start paying in 1976 when I became 14) were 3p to 10p depending on distance. My school lunch cost 17p in 1971 (previously 3s4d). We still have some paperback books from the sixties with prices like 3s.

In 1971 the new 10p and 5p were identical in size, weight and thickness to the 2s and 1s they replaced (having the same value as them), and were used interchangeably for many years. In 1990 the 50p, 10p and 5p were all substantially reduced in size. The 1p and 2p were originally made of copper, but the metal became more valuable than the coin. So now they are made of steel and plated. Why they didn't also make them smaller at the same time, I don't know. I do hope they are withdrawn before long. These days if you see a copper on the floor, you kick it.

Originally British coins were made so that value was proportionate to weight in two groups, "silver" (in the 1960s that was 6d, 1s, 2s, 2s6d, 5s, though the last, a huge coin, was only really minted as a collector's coin and I never saw one in circulation) and "copper" (1d, 1/2d, and 1/4d until 1960), but the chunky 12-sided 3d stood as an isolate. This made it convenient for banks which could simply weigh a bag full of unsorted "silver" or "copper" and know how much money it was. But when you consider the size of the smallest coin, the largest then becomes very large, the 5s ten times the weight of a 6d for example. This property transferred to the new currency in 1971, with the isolate 3d withdrawn, but the 7-sided 50p standing as a new, but large, isolate. Later when the 20p coin was introduced, to reduce the weight in our pocket, it was smaller than an old 5p, and less than 40% the weight of old 50p coin.

These weight proportions may be convenient to banks, but are utterly pointless to the user. What is the point of carrying a 10p coin in place of two 5p coins, when the weight is the same?