I guess I'm not sure why it was such a hostile act to ask for an example, especially considering that my personal experience is the opposite of yours. This is why personal experience is basically meaningless (and often personal experience is colored by all kinds of bias in perception; somebody who has to deal with rate changes is far more likely to think it happens more often than somebody who was never affected). I don't mind you saying that you don't know how often the rates change, and you not knowing doesn't mean that you are wrong, but I do mind it when you get all huffy about it and slap me in the face with my question. :thinking:

Looking some more at the link I posted, and things on the same website, it does appear that different cities have their own rates, and it does appear that there are relatively frequent changes in the whole set (every few months), but it's unclear how often one particular point changes (and this data point is the one relevant to this discussion). The data is in PDF format, making it rather hard to do more precise analysis to find out how often a particular city or county changes its rate. Too bad they can't just put up a CSV file or something.

It's not like the electronic system is going to be plastering your transactions where everyone can see them. Being paranoid is silly too. If you're worried about your spouse finding something out, don't use a joint account, which is an option that's been available for years. If you're worried about the government finding something out, use an off-shore account like quite a few people already do. If you're worried about retailers tracking your spending habits, use the equivalent of gift cards which are certainly available already.

In any case, anonymously using the government-owned legal tender is a luxury, not a right. If you want to live without the government being able to track what you're doing, don't use the legal tender they provide you with.

Well, see, now you're making a different statement. You're saying that people shouldn't be worried ever, which is different from saying that people who are worried are some form of criminal. Anyhow, I'm not going to defend the anonymity argument too much as I don't really care about the issue (I do almost all of my transactions with plastic, and when I don't, it's because the store doesn't take my card or has a minimum or something stupid). I just think you're assuming a little too strongly that your personal preference regarding anonymity is the same as everybody else's.

Also, love it or leave it.

Updating prices when taxes change in retail is not adding work. They change the prices every damn week with those weekly sales you capitalist pigdogs like so much.

Actually (at least in Kmart's case) it's not always a sale, so much as an "advertised price", ie, the same regular price but with a blurb in the weekly paper ad and a pretty sign in the store to make it stand out.

They *are* watching.
I always use cash, and sometimes I even have the correct change.

Betther to be me than a socialist manbearpig :rolleyes:

Speaking of being paranoid and doing things that society doesn't want you to do, there are plenty of things that are fine with one very large segment of the population but not fine at all for another very large segment of the population. In these instances, I don't think it's fair to say that somebody is doing something that "society" doesn't want them to, or to blame them for not wanting flak for something legal that isn't marginal.

"Ditch cash" is the logical conclusion of the argument "ditch pennies."

Inconvenient, there's better ways, blah yadda.

"Having pennies" is the logical result of "having cash."

Prices of common goods are set using pennies, so you want those pieces.

Sure, we could change all of everything so that stuff you go out
to buy is rounded to the nickel or the dime. But people don't want
that. That's really it. People like cash, people like pennies.

Sure, gimme a whole routine involving "find me one person that
likes pennies." But apparently we like em, cuz we have em. Cash
and pennies may themselves cause some anals some heartache, but
apparently people think they're good to have, and so we have em.

It seems to me pretty amazing that we have as close to an agreed-upon
set of ideas of worth that money actually makes sense. My guess is
that even after thousands of years it's so abstracted from our ape
brains that we just need something to hold in quantities and
denominations we can count…even if it's as inconvenient as a
barbell's weight of near-worthless coins. Their value to us isn't
limited to their purchasing power or carrying convenience. They
are totems we can't do without yet.

The privacy arguments, imo, don't come close to touching what we love
about our shiny coins and fragrant bills.

-Crat

There's no real reason for the smallest possible measurement of money to have a physical representation. In the financial world one very regularly uses numbers smaller than pennies, and while this matters little for transactions of a few units, it makes a big difference for large transactions, compounded interest, and so forth.

There you go again, trying to optimize people.



The "real" reason is that people want that level of granularity because to them,
given the current economy and pricing, it makes sense. In Zimbabwe, where
you buy bread with thousand (is it million now?) dollar notes, it doesn't make
sense to people to use pennies. Here it does.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

I didn't say that pennies weren't an appropriate level of granularity for physical coins. I was saying that there's no particular reason to tie granularity of goods' prices to the granularity of the currency's physical denomination.

I understand what you mean, though I'd say the tender itself and
its buying power generate a chicken and egg. As long as the currency
is valuable enough to give you competitive advantage to price at 9.99
rather than 10.00, there kind of is reason…even if it feels a bit circular.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

But that is what I'm trying to say. There is also a competitive advantage to price at 9.989 for certain commodities bought in large quantities, as there is a competitive advantage in having interest rates set to x instead of y where the difference at first is in units smaller than pennies. But that's not reason enough to have tenths of pennies as our smallest coin. You might respond that "normal people" only really care about pennies as the smallest unit for their normal transactions, although even then I imagine that most people would not notice a difference of a couple of pennies in a largeish transaction. If you were to keep things with penny-denominated prices, and then have some kind of rounding rule, I imagine that a whole lot of people wouldn't even notice the difference in the end of the day. (Of course, we soon start getting into the delightful irrationalities that we have as humans; you tell someone that they're losing a penny here and they'll get all kinds of upset, but if you don't tell them and it "just happens" they likely wouldn't notice. "Predictably irrational", as the book title goes.)

I suspect we are talking past each other somewhat. I understand a
point I think you are making, that the penny is as arbitrary as
a tenth of a penny. I get it. If that's your main point, you
brought it. It's brung.

I'm saying that while arbitrary, the penny happens to be, as of
today, a unit of actual use and sufficient value to be meaningful
enough to Joe Schmoe that it is reason enough to set prices with.

In 20 years inflation may render it so worthless that it is
simply disregarded in pricing of common goods, and when that
day comes, I'd guess the penny might well just fade away from
our pockets. Well, mine. You and Elanthis seem to travel in
more rarefied environments and may not have them in yer pockets
to fade in the first place.

If what you're saying is that this day is here, now, then that's
probably where we're disagreeing.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

My problem with your position is that you are basing an arbitrary choice on what is actually used in general, as opposed to what is actually used by "normal people" buying "normal things" like food and other such things while simultaneously being noticed by those normal people. Units smaller than pennies are in true actual use all over the country, even Joe Schmoe's bank account (for example, in interest computation).

If your argument is that a normal person's threshold for caring is a penny as opposed to a tenth of a penny, then that's fine, but as stated you seem to be saying that it is in fact the smallest unit in actual use, which is not true.

Yes, but my argument is that we have cash because people like cash,
and we have pennies because people (purchasers and retailers) find
pennies useful in today's economy. My argument about the usefulness
of the current denominations is premised on the usefulness of them
to Mr. Schmoe in having them in his pocket.



That is part of my argument.



That is not part of my argument. If it seems to be, then I've
expressed myself poorly.

-Crat
http://lpmuds.net

Ah. Well, you misspoke, you rhetorically incompetent basterd, and I misunderstood, being a comprehension challenged basterd. That means you have to buy me a beer and I have to buy you one too. Sound fair?

Yep. After you eat the peanuts out of my shit.

BTW, what's the cratpeg rule around here?