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| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 226 responses total. |
keesan
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response 100 of 226:
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Apr 28 17:35 UTC 2002 |
How else could companies make you think you were paying less if they could
not list all their prices ending in .99? Even the food coop does it.
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other
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response 101 of 226:
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Apr 28 17:44 UTC 2002 |
Well, my guess is that that sort of pricing would mostly be rounded down
to .95, which poses a possible counter-argument to jp2's claim about
inflation.
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jp2
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response 102 of 226:
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Apr 28 17:53 UTC 2002 |
This response has been erased.
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other
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response 103 of 226:
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Apr 28 17:58 UTC 2002 |
Lessee, eliminate the lowest denomination out of a currency system in
which the vast majority of coins of that denomination do not even
circulate and are generally considered not even worth the trouble of
picking up off the sidewalk, or eliminate the unique correncies of
several sovereign nations with independent economies in favor of a single
multinational currency. Hmm... the only connection I see there is that
I might be able to compare them rationally if I were suffering from
cranial-rectal inversion. Oh! No *wonder* Jamie entered #102!
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rcurl
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response 104 of 226:
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Apr 28 18:03 UTC 2002 |
I pick up pennies. Helps keep excess copper out of the environment.
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jp2
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response 105 of 226:
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Apr 28 18:06 UTC 2002 |
This response has been erased.
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gull
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response 106 of 226:
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Apr 28 21:12 UTC 2002 |
When Australia (I think it was Australia, anyway) did it, it wasn't
inflationary, I hear. The tax law was changed so that the final value was
rounded to the nearest 5 cents, so it mostly came out even.
I've noticed some stores now are ignoring the penny amounts and just taking
the few cent difference as a loss, so it probably wouldn't be inflationary
in most cases. I guess the real question is how gas stations would handle
it.
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jaklumen
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response 107 of 226:
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Apr 28 23:31 UTC 2002 |
use the penny in pricing instead of the mill? I posed phasing out
pennies and using them in gasoline pricing to an economics teacher I
had who was also a Regional State Labor economist, and he seemed to
like it.
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mdw
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response 108 of 226:
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Apr 29 02:03 UTC 2002 |
I *thought* it was aluminum -- but I also think I heard or read that at
least 20 years ago...
Any country that's been existance long enough has to phase out currency
at the low end. When's the last time you saw a farthing in circulation?
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bdh3
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response 109 of 226:
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Apr 29 06:24 UTC 2002 |
The last time I visited mexico the prices were marked to the centavo
(1/100th of a peso) but in the larger supermercados one would receive
change rounded up to the next highest denomination coin. In the
local bodegas one would recieve exact change.
The last time I visited the PRC the prices were marked to the fen
(1/100th of a jiao, 10 jiao=1 yuan) and I don't recall receiving
anything other than exact change anywhere.
1Peso ~= 1Yuan (@10 cents US). Sorta interesting that the PRC has
an order of magnitude more descrete price points along with a
tradition it seems of 'exact change'. Wonder what that means
culturally? (the chinese are in fact what the jews are accused of?)
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other
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response 110 of 226:
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Apr 29 10:42 UTC 2002 |
...dIscrete...
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keesan
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response 111 of 226:
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Apr 29 14:28 UTC 2002 |
Lots of stores keep a small container of pennies around so they can add one
instead of returning several to you.
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lynne
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response 112 of 226:
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Apr 29 14:57 UTC 2002 |
It's a common middle-school/high school experiment these days to hold a post-
1983 penny in a Bunsen burner and watch the heat transform the copper and
zinc into brass (alloy). I'm pretty sure this is illegal, but it was a
fun experiment. :)
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jp2
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response 113 of 226:
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Apr 29 14:59 UTC 2002 |
This response has been erased.
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jmsaul
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response 114 of 226:
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Apr 29 15:19 UTC 2002 |
I doubt it's illegal. They've got machines you can put a penny into and have
it turned into a small medallion.
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other
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response 115 of 226:
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Apr 29 17:06 UTC 2002 |
The law against such currency defacement was repealed many years ago.
When i was in high school chemistry, we zinc-plated the pennies first, then
held them for a brief moment in a bunsen burner. It made the alloying process
much faster and increased the "wow!" factor. The only drawback was that the
plating was pretty skimpy and wore away before long.
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gull
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response 116 of 226:
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Apr 29 17:31 UTC 2002 |
In one of my college chemistry courses, I remember dissolving pennies in
nitric acid, then doing transmission spectroscopy on the resulting
solution for both old and new pennies and looking at the differences.
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rcurl
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response 117 of 226:
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Apr 29 17:44 UTC 2002 |
How did you zinc plate the pennies? Plating zinc isn't easy.
What did you measure with transmission spectroscopy? I would expect
the only difference would be the amount of copper in solution, which
would make a blue-green solution, which could be judged by eye. Of
course, you learned something about spectroscopy, too.
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russ
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response 118 of 226:
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Apr 30 06:02 UTC 2002 |
The embossed pennies are passe. What's *really* cool are the
magnetically imploded shrunken quarters.
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other
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response 119 of 226:
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Apr 30 11:24 UTC 2002 |
Never seen that trick. Sounds neato. Does it damage the MRI unit?
#117: I think we electroplated them, but it was a long time ago, and I
don't really remember the how part.
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gull
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response 120 of 226:
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Apr 30 12:52 UTC 2002 |
Re #117: Right, that was the point.
Re #119: There's a great site about quarter shrinking here:
http://www.aquila.net/berthickman/frames/shrinker.html
It's done by discharging a big bank of capacitors through a coil, with the
quarter restrained in the center. It's fairly dangerous because of the
extreme forces involved:
"The large current that's induced into the outer rim of the coin may reach a
million amperes or more. Since the initial energy is in the range of 3,500 -
8,500 Joules, the instantaneous power is awesome, and for a brief instant is
roughly equal to the electrical power consumed by the entire city of
Chicago. The repulsion forces between the work coil and the coin create a
huge radial inward compressive force on the coin that easily overcomes the
yield strength of all the metal(s) in the coin, causing the coin to
plastically deform into a much smaller diameter. ... At the same time, a
similar outward radial force literally explodes the work coil."
The guy who wrote the page uses a blast shield of 1/2" Lexan, and has
managed to shatter it.
Hmm, something actually relevent to the penny discussion:
"It also works with older copper pennies. However, newer (>1982) pennies are
actually mostly zinc with a thin copper flashing. The copper layer
vaporizes, leaving an unrecognizable partially vaporized blob of molten
zinc."
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jmsaul
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response 121 of 226:
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Apr 30 14:10 UTC 2002 |
Yeah, I saw the shrunken quarter sites last year. I'd like to get my hands
on an actual shrunken quarter, though.
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tsty
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response 122 of 226:
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Apr 30 17:27 UTC 2002 |
has anyone succeeded at installing eudora 5.1 under an XP os?
no compatibility mode works, - setup runs self-extracting
install shield (in 16 bit mode with ntvdm controlling)
the progbress bar up to 99% ... and stalls... pretty soon
there is this 'win16 subsystem is unstable.'
no! tell me it ain't so!
what seems to freeze is.... explorer.exe (weird?!) i kill explorer
in the task manger and re-instantiate it in task manager and the
four processes, ntvdm, wowexec eudora51 and setup are still listed
but ther is no action ... and then 'win16 subsys unstable.'
yes. popped the results to qualcomm .. just wondered if anyone
conqured another xp 'featuer.'
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mdw
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response 123 of 226:
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Apr 30 21:42 UTC 2002 |
Doesn't this belong in the "announcements" item?
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tpryan
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response 124 of 226:
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May 1 15:56 UTC 2002 |
Are there commuting oppurtunities along Michigan Ave toward
Downtown Detroit, so that, if I was to get a job downtown, I wouldn't
have to drive the entire distance? And pay for parking?
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