Side note, related to declaring variables but not an issue that you encountered: OpenSCAD does not allow setting the value of a variable more than once. So this code is illegal:
x = 1;
echo(x);
x = 2;
echo(x);
Second note is that whenever you introduce a construct such as {union(), difference(), if(), for()}, variables declared within the braces are scoped, so they don't exist between iterations or after the scope ends.
if (true) { y = -1; }
echo(y); // Illegal
However, just introducing braces without a construct does not restrict the variable to the scope:
Oh good point; I wouldn't have noticed if you didn't point it out. The last ~5 comments from yoan9224 are all in 4-paragraph format. A few comments before that are in 3-paragraph format. They all look suspiciously uniform in writing style, and very mechanical.
frankly for me it stands out even reading this single comment. the classic it’s not X it’s Y + “what’s missing from the article” (basically a flashing neon sign). perhaps that’s why i get so annoyed by these comments, they’re just a stylistic monoculture which gets tiresome very quickly.
> The tried-and-true grid-scale storage option—pumped hydro [--> https://spectrum.ieee.org/a-big-hydro-project-in-big-sky-cou... ], in which water is pumped between reservoirs at different elevations—lasts for decades and can store thousands of megawatts for days.
It looks like the article text is using the wrong unit for energy capacity in these contexts. I think it should be megawatt-hours, not megawatts. If this is true, this is a big yikes for something coming out of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
> big yikes for something coming out of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Besides the unit flub, there's an unpleasant smell of sales flyer to the whole piece. Hard data spread all over, but couldn't find efficiency figures. Casual smears such as "even the best new grid-scale storage systems on the market—mainly lithium-ion batteries—provide only about 4 to 8 hours of storage" (huh, what, why?). I could also have used an explanation of why CO2, instead of nitrogen.
> provide only about 4 to 8 hours of storage" (huh, what, why?)
Because the most efficient way to make money with a lithium ion battery (or rather the marginal opportunity after the higher return ones like putting it in a car are taken) is to charge it in the few hours of when electricity is cheapest and discharge it when it is most expensive, every single day, and those windows generally aren't more than 8 hours long...
Once the early opportunities are taken lower value ones will be where you store more energy and charge and discharge at a lower margin or less frequently will be, but we aren't there yet.
Advertising that your new technology doesn't do this is taking a drawback (it requires a huge amount of scale in one place to be cost competitive) and pretending it's an advantage. The actual advantage, if there is one, is just that at sufficient scale it's cheaper (a claim I'm not willing to argue either way).
It ought to be cheaper at scale. Batteries' cost scales linearly with storage capacity. Cost for a plant like this scales linearly with the storage rate - the compressor and turbine are the expensive part, while the pressure vessels and gas bags are relatively cheap.
The bigger you build it, the less it costs per MWh of storage.
> Energy Dome expects its LDES solution to be 30 percent cheaper than lithium-ion.
Grid scale lithium is dropping in cost about 10-20% per year, so with a construction time of 2 years per the article lithium will be cheaper by the time the next plant is completed
Li-ion and even LFP batteries degrade; given a daily discharge cycle, they'll be at 80% capacity in 3 years. Gas pumps and tanks won't lose any capacity.
Power plants are often described in terms of (max) power output, i.e., contribution to the grid. So, I can see how it might confuse a writer to then also talk about storage inadvertently.
But also, the second paragraph already describes the 100 MWh vs MW nuance.
It is not a nuance in an article that focuses on storage from the supposed premier professional association. As an engineer I would expect typical energy content (median/average) of the top 10 hydro pump projects and also some discussion about the availability of suitable sites. I think one should strive for at least high school level physics. There is no need to push out texts that can be easily surpassed by any current llm.
If 1 watt is 1 joule per second then, honestly, what are we doing with watt-hours?
Why can’t battery capacity be described in joules? And then charge and discharge being a function of voltage and current, could be represented in joules per unit time. Instead its watt-hours for capacity, watts for flow rate.
Watt-hours… that’s joules / seconds * hours? This is cursed.
I believe it's just a matter of intuitively useful units. There's simply too many seconds in a day for people to have an immediate grasp on the quantity. If you're using a space heater or thinking about how much power your fridge uses kilowatt hours is an easy unit to intuit. If you know you have a battery backup with 5 kilowatt hours of capacity and your fridge averages 500 watts then you've got 10 hours. If you convert it all to watt seconds the mental math is harder. And realistically in day to day life most of what we're measuring for sake of our power bill, etc. is stuff that's operating on a timetable of hours or days.
I use the conversion factor so often that I know it by heart: 1 day = 86400 seconds. I punch that 5-digit integer into a calculator, not an approximation like 8.5e5 (which is the same length, haha).
I'm not sure if I would call it sarcasm, but it's a reference to a popular computer science joke format.
The first time I saw it:
>There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
The joke is that 10 is how you express 2 in base 2.
I think there is another layer to the joke, though; often in mathematics, computer science, algorithms, and software engineering, things get divided into sets, sets get broken down into two sets according to whether some property about the elements is true or false, and this joke echoes that.
"litres-of-fuel per km-driven" (Volume/Distance) is still fully reductible to an area: litres is still a volume (1 cubic decimeter) and km is still a distance (1x10⁴ dm) Maybe you meant that the other way around? Distance/Volume (as in Miles/gallon) is an Area⁻¹ (Distance⁻²), which is more difficult to imagine in space.
Now, Kg is a measure of mass (or weight, depending on who you are asking), which throws density into the equation, which is proportional to the temperature, which will vary according to where and when the driving takes place. But since the time and place, and hence the temperature is (allegedly) defined when the fuel consumption was tested, the density is a constant, and as such you can leave it out from the relation.
If you car was fueled by a fixed pipe which it travelled along, consuming all the fuel in the sections of the pipe that it moved past but no more, what would the cross section of the pipe be?
> Now, Kg is a measure of mass (or weight, depending on who you are asking), which throws density into the equation, [...]
It's the other way round: chemically how much energy you get from burning your fuel is almost completely a function of mass, not of volume. (And in fact, you aren't burning liquid fuel either, in many engines the fuel gets vaporised before you burn it, thus expanding greatly in volume but keeping the same mass.)
> [...] which throws density into the equation, which is proportional to the temperature [...]
For an ideal gas, sure. But not for liquid fuels.
> "litres-of-fuel per km-driven" (Volume/Distance) is still fully reductible to an area: litres is still a volume (1 cubic decimeter) and km is still a distance (1x10⁴ dm) Maybe you meant that the other way around? Distance/Volume (as in Miles/gallon) is an Area⁻¹ (Distance⁻²), which is more difficult to imagine in space.
I don't think that the reciprocal is a problem. No, what I mean is that you can't cancel fuel with driving. Litres-of-fuel is a different unit than distance-driven ^ 3. Similar to how torque and energy are different physical quantities that you can't cancel willy-nilly, despite their units looking similar.
You might find a physical interpretation for an adventurous cancelling, and that's fine. But that's because you are looking behind the raw unadorned units at the physics, and basing your decision on that.
Units are a very stripped down look at physics. So units working out are necessary for cancelling to make sense, but not sufficient.
Also the UK gallon is different from the US gallon. And the same applies to all the other non-metric fluid measurements such as pints and fluid ounces. Historically the UK gallon was used throughout the former British Empire (Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, Malaysia, New Zealand, South Africa, etc). By contrast, almost nobody ever officially used the US gallon except for the US (and a small handful of highly US-influenced countries such as Liberia).
It is not more cursed than km/h (1 m/s = 3600 m/h = 3.6 km/h)
Both those units are more convenient than their SI equivalent and their "cursedness" come from the hour/minute/second time division.
If we had decimal time, as it was initially proposed with the metric system, we wouldn't have this problem, but we weren't ready to let go of hours/minute/second.
Yeah. I get this is all kind of silly. I think what trips me up is that a watt doesn’t represent a timeless amount of something the way a meter does. A watt involves a unit amount of time.
Imagine if the distance between you and I was 438 kiloflerp-hours. And to get to you in one hour I have to drive at a speed of 438 kiloflerps. It works, it kinda makes sense. It just feels inconsistent with all the other units I work with.
You're right. If you really want to mess with speed and distance, just rename "nautical mile" to "knot-hour". In fact, that might be a great idea for trolling – it is fewer syllables (4 vs. 2), and aviation pilots definitely use knots for speed, so why not simplify the vocabulary and ditch the unique term "nautical mile" in favor of pairing two existing words?
Another place where the cursed unit of hour crops up is describing the amount of electric charge that you can pull out of a battery (especially rechargeable ones) in terms of millamp-hours (mA⋅h). Note that in actual SI, 1 mA⋅h = 3.6 C (coulombs). Even more cursed is high-capacity lithium-ion USB power banks that are advertised like 10,000 mAh (or even "10K mAh"), which should at least be simplified to 10 A⋅h (ampere-hours). But mA⋅h isn't a good way to describe batteries because you also need to multiply by voltage (3.7 V for Li-ion, I think 1.2 V for NiMH) to figure out the energy (usually expressed in W⋅h).
One more fun fact - photographic flash units are advertised in watt-seconds (W⋅s) for the maximum amount of energy delivered in a flash pulse of light. But that just simplifies to joules, which is a shorter and less confusing unit name. People really need to stop multiplying watts with time and use joules as designed in the SI.
For me, one of the most cursed unit, but not because it is ill-conceived is the Nm (the unit of torque).
It is analogous to the Joule, but it doesn't mean the same thing. "This car has a 250 million ft.lb battery and 0.1 Wh of torque" passes dimensional analysis.
A watt of power multiplied by a second of time has an agreed upon name called joule, but a watt second is also a perfectly valid SI name.
A watt is a joule of energy divided by a second of time, this is a rate, joule per second is also a valid name similar to nautical mile per hour and knot being the same unit.
Multiplication vs division, quantity vs rate, see the relationship? Units may have different names but are equivalent, both the proper name and compound name are acceptable.
A watt hour is 3600 joules, it’s more convenient to use and matches more closely with how electrical energy is typically consumed. Kilowatt hour is again more directly relatable than 3.6 megajoules.
Newton meter and Coulomb volt are other names for the joule. In pure base units it is a kilogram-meter squared per second squared.
So when I torque all 20 of my car's lug bolts to 120 n-M, I've exerted 2/3 of a W-h? So if it takes me 4 minutes, I'm averaging 10 watts? That's neat. I wonder what the peak wattage (right as the torque wrench clicks) would be; it must depend on angular velocity.
Newton meter as a unit of energy is not the same as the newton meter unit of force for torque.
The energy unit meter is distance moved, while the force unit meter is the length of the moment arm.
This is confusing even though valid, so the energy unit version is rarely used.
You can exert newton meters of force while using no energy, say by standing on a lug nut wrench allowing gravity to exert the force indefinitely unless the nut breaks loose.
Ah! I guess that explains the "f" for "force" in the imperial abbreviation "ft-lbf", to distinguish it from work. I wonder if there's ever been an analogous variant for metric such as "Nmf"...
It seems the common thread is that the f means to introduce G, but not exactly. In my own research, the AI summaries are about as sloppy as I've ever seen, due to the vague and often regional differences (with the difference between ft-lb and lb-ft sometimes being described as relevant, as well).
Of course it can be. Nobody does it in practice because it's inconvenient.
Watts = volts * amps and the people working with batteries are already thinking in terms of voltage and amperage. It'd be painful to introduce a totally new unit and remember 1 watt for an hour is 3.6kj instead of... 1 watt-hour.
What people care about when talking about EVs and consumption is generally how much distance they can cover. If you take away the distance factor and just report power, it becomes meaningless/almost useless.
Many people think of driving in time rather than distance. I'd say it's actually more common to say a city is 3 hours away rather than 200 miles.
What makes kW less useful is really just that most EVs don't advertise their capacity very prominently. But if you knew you had an 80 kWh battery and the car uses 20 kW at freeway speeds, then it's easy to see that it'll drive for 4 hours.
The problem with this is that destinations are a fixed distance away, whereas their time distance is not fixed. In most journeys people want to reach a specific place rather than drive for a given amount of time.
I understand all this but the most important question for me is definitely still "how much distance can I cover on a charge"? That's why I prefer kWh/100km.
Directly reporting required power is still comparable among vehicles: 55kW vs 49kW, eg
Which is definitely less intuitive because it hasn't been introduced to the public, but is interchangeable in the same quirky way we already compare MPG (Distance/Volume) with lt/100KM (Volume/Distance)
Heh. To borrow an idea from xkcd (measuring gas consumption as area): The kWh measures energy, right? And energy is force times distance. So energy divided by distance is force!
Let’s all start measuring EV consumption in newtons, folks.
It even makes intuitive sense: It correlates well with how hard you need to push the car to get it going at the usual travel speed. But it sucks if you need to figure out how far you can travel on a given charge.
Yeah, if only we would define seconds to be 13.4% shorter than that are, we could have 100ks days. Also, ksecs would be a really convenient unit for planning one's day: a ~15 minute resolution is just right for just about any type of appointment.
Oh, and 1Ms weeks, consisting of 7 working days and 3 off days sound nice too.
Much better to make seconds slightly larger than 2 seconds, and move to a dozenal system throughout. One hour is (1000)_12 novoseconds. A semi-day is (10000)_12.
Oh, we should switch our standard counting system to dozenal a well.
Not every area is as messed up as the Colorado river watershed...
All users (states) were given an allotment which, when it was set, was more than what would ever be the yearly supply.
From the outset it was essentially a free for all. Everyone was happy, they kinda got what they asked. It's just that they were all living in a paper reality
I should have explained in my original comment why I think those sentences are wrong. I'll do so now.
> pumped hydro [...] can store thousands of megawatts for days.
You can't "store" a megawatt – because you can only store energy, not power.
But another interpretation is, if you actually store thousands of megawatts (i.e. gigawatts) for days, then at the very least, 1 GW × 1 day = 24 GW⋅h. If we take "a few" to mean 3, then 3 GW × 3 day = 216 GW⋅h. I'm not sure there exists a large enough pumped hydro plant in the world that stores 216 GW⋅h of energy. So I think the article meant to say, "store a few gigawatt-hours to be released over a period of a few days".
> Media reports show renderings of domes but give widely varying storage capacities—including 100 MW and 1,000 MW.
Once again, you can't store megawatts of power, full stop. You can store megawatt-hours of energy. The linked article at Bloomberg said that a project in China is building 600 MW of wind power, 400 MW of solar power, and 1 GW⋅h of energy storage – which is the correct unit.
Glad to see this. MATLAB doesn't even have consistent/sensible syntax, or at least doesn't have consistent syntax relative to almost all other programming languages in existence.
> HTML parsing is not stable and a line of HTML being parsed and serialized and parsed again may turn into something rather different
This is why people should really use XHTML, the strict XML dialect of HTML, in order to avoid these nasty parsing surprises. It has the predictable behavior that you want.
In XHTML, the code does exactly what it says it does. If you write <table><a></a></table> like the example on the mXSS page, then you get a table element and an anchor child. As another example, if you write <table><td>xyz</td></table>, that's exactly what you get, and there are no implicit <tbody> or <tr> inserted inside.
It's just wild as I continue to watch the world double down for decades on HTML and all its wild behavior in parsing. Furthermore, HTML's syntax is a unique snowflake, whereas XML is a standardized language that just so happens to be used in SVG, MathML, Atom, and other standards - no need to relearn syntax every single time.
I don’t think this is right. XHTML guarantees well-formedness (matched closing tags et al) but doesn’t do anything for validity. It’s not semantically valid for <td> to be a direct child of <table>, so the user agent has to make the call as to what to display regardless of the (X)HTML flavor. The alternative is parsing failure on improperly nested HTML which I don’t think is desirable.
> The alternative is parsing failure on improperly nested HTML which I don’t think is desirable.
It was that decision that resulted in the current mess. Browser vendors could have given us a grace period to fix HTML that didn't validate against the schema. Instead they said "there is no schema"
The issue as I see it is that XML schemas are fine[0] for immutable documents but not suited for dynamic content. As a user it would be extraordinarily frustrating for a site or web app to break midflow because of a schema validation failure after a setHTML call or something.
[0]: I’ve worked with XML schemas a lot and have grown to really dislike them actually but that’s neither here nor there
> The ia64 is a very demanding architecture. In tomorrow’s entry, I’ll talk about some other ways the ia64 will make you pay the penalty when you take shortcuts in your code and manage to skate by on the comparatively error-forgiving i386.
If you as a consumer care about rounding, then just buy three of them: 3× $0.99 = $2.97, which rounds down to $2.95 USD, netting you a $0.02 bonus (the maximum possible).
The rounding is done at the end of the transaction, not per item. I speak from experience in Canada - it is indeed possible to execute this transaction in real life. And basic food items have no sales tax, so the price you see on the shelf is the price that you pay at checkout. It is 100% realistic to go into a food store, grab 3 items at $0.99 CAD each, and pay $2.95 CAD in cash.
Because you as a consumer has control over the transaction, I find any arguments against rounding to be ridiculous.
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 cotton paper), colorful banknotes (instead of all green) that are easy to distinguish, $1 and $2 coins in wide circulation (instead of worn-out $1 bills).
I'm reminded of when Minnesota passed the Minnesota Clean Indoor Air Act (MCIAA) close to 20 years ago. (Some) restauranteurs - along with the GOP - made pronouncements about how this would destroy the economy. No one would go to out to eat or for a drink again. Doom and gloom.
Last I checked, there are plenty of restaurants open in the state, and things are going fine. In fact, just before the MCIAA went into effect, I had a newborn, and we went out to eat one time with him in tow. We asked for a non-smoking area but were placed immediately next to a family chain smoking. We decided to never go out to eat again until we could do so without risk of second-hand smoke.
My point is that there are frequently these predictions of things being impossible or even just incredibly difficult and not worth the effort, and in the end, it's not a big deal.
> I'm reminded of when Minnesota passed the Minnesota Clean Indoor Air Act (MCIAA) close to 20 years ago. (Some) restauranteurs - along with the GOP - made pronouncements about how this would destroy the economy. No one would go to out to eat or for a drink again. Doom and gloom.
Yeah, they had done the same thing when California did the same thing 30 years ago. The fact that it didn't happen then didn't stop them from doing it everywhere else similar laws were subsequently proposed.
People overestimated the importance that smokers placed on being able to smoke in public.
A Japanese airline (Air Do) tried reintroducing the smoking section in the 1990s. It did not go well for them, and Japan's tobacco use rate was several times the US's.
I'll agree on all but one point. The cotton/linen notes feel so much better in the hand than the candy wrapper plastic of Canadian bills. I know it's a dumb reason, but I just hate the feeling.
Australian here. Barely anyone uses cash anymore. It's weird to see debates about moving towards technology we had 35 years ago which we don't even use anymore.
But, a cashless society is not a panacea. It may be higher tech and more convenient, but it can have significant privacy costs, not to mention the issues with payment card networks engaging in censorship, charging fairly high transaction fees, and pushing the problem of fraud on their networks to every merchant. Considering the payment card network market is seemingly impossible to enter, and governments don't seem to be able or perhaps willing to regulate things, there are ways in which cashless is a downgrade. It would be nice if we could back up and try to resolve some of these issues in a durable by-design way, but sadly it's probably never happening.
I wasn't aware the satellites also beamed down power, and that all ATMs were connected to satellites instead of cellular networks or wires.
It would also take quite a lot of refilling when everyone in a city needs to use the ATM.
We still need to be able to function during weeklong post-storm/flood power outages, which happen with quite some regularity. Here in New Zealand, the most recent weeklong outage in Southland was only last month, primarily due to 200kph winds.
Let us not sacrifice everything to the gods of convenience.
My politics and his don't line up but I'm not against this. It would be pretty interesting to see the impact on cash usage, and faces on money are pretty archeologically useful-- at least on coins.
let's wait a few years before rotating faces to avoid debating another blatantly illegal thing Dear Leader would propose (actually he already did but it was out of the news rather quickly)
I am suspicious of any claims about relative cleanliness. As with wooden vs plastic cutting boards, our intuitions are likely misleading.
To be an effective fomite the currency has to not kill the microbe, and it has to readily give up the microbe to the next recipient. Organic materials like cotton or linen seem more likely to simply absorb a viral envelope or bacterial cell wall, thereby rendering it ineffective. Furthermore, the porous nature makes it more difficult for the note to give up any microbe that isn't immediately killed before it naturally dies over time.
A brief search of the scientific literature doesn't seem to show any conclusive results, but it does seem like the relative performance is pathogen specific.
The linked article raises a few problems that the US could have with that solution:
> Four states - Delaware, Connecticut, Michigan and Oregon - as well as numerous cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Miami and Washington, DC, require merchants to provide exact change.
This seems like a non-issue as long as they round the price down. Because there's no law that the store can't discount their total by a small amount and then provide exact change.
"Congratulations customer, we have a special coupon today for $0.03 off your purchase. Here's your change :)"
> In addition, the law covering the federal food assistance program known as SNAP requires that recipients not be charged more than other customers. Since SNAP recipients use a debit card that’s charged the precise amount, if merchants round down prices for cash purchases, they could be opening themselves to legal problems and fines, said Jeff Lenard, spokesperson for NACS.
So just round snap transactions too, not just cash ones. Now SNAP recipients are never paying more than any other customer for the same basket of goods.
So how do they account for people who use coupons or rewards cards today? Those create a discount that technically result in charging some customers less than others, including SNAP users. In the case of rounding, you wouldn't be charging SNAP user any more that other users who use cards for payment. The point of the law was to prevent stores from charging surcharges etc on food stamp users back in the day.
Rewards are taken from merchant fees. The retailer isn't party to that rebate. Likewise, coupons are almost always funded by the manufacturer who returns those monies to the store.
That would be true for credit card fees, but not for stuff like loyalty card discounts.
"Likewise, coupons are almost always funded by the manufacturer who returns those monies to the store."
It doesn't matter. The store is the one charging the customer. As stated, the law says the store cannot charge SNAP recipients more. Thus it would be a violation if we are taking it strictly.
When I lived in Australia, those paying with card were charged the exact amount. Those paying cash would round to the nearest 5 cents, in the customer’s favor. I suspect the same will happen here.
I don't see why you couldn't do it in either case. If you modify the actual price, then you are giving exact change. Why wouldn't round() be as valid a price modification as floor()?
Presumably "increase the price a small amount to avoid giving exact change" is exactly the sort of thing that laws requiring giving exact change were designed to prevent.
There will surely be some customer pissed about the extra 2 cents they were charged who will raise hell over the exact change law.
But what customer is going to be upset over a small discount?
At big retailers the price tag code indicates what type of price it is. For example the last digits can mean:
0: full
9: sale
8: reduced
7: clearance (item will not restock)
I forget the exact system Sears used but we could tell at a glance if a deal was really “good”.
I’m curious if Sears and WalMart used different systems and if WalMart exploited knowledge of the Sears system to signal better prices to shoppers. Like a full WalMart price being .97 and clearance being .94.
That sounds close to the Sears system to me, but they used the tens place. 8x was used for returned big ticket items, like appliances and treadmills. It would start at 88 and the rightmost digit would decrement to indicate how many weeks it had been sitting there.
It was 00 for full, 99 for sale (the majority of items, except for the one week every year they established the full price for that product), 8x for clearance.
Ah yeah, I forget the details. It was a sophisticated system. I’m curious of the origins. Did this have bookkeeping or business reporting benefits in the pre-digital age? Even when we were using computers at the turn of the millennium it helped signal discount eligibility without having to update and synchronize inventory with promotional offers.
It’s far more complicated than that. There is no one sales tax for everyone.
Oregon residents didn’t pay sales tax when making purchases in Idaho. Washington charges sales tax on out of state purchases if that state’s sales tax is less than Washington’s, including if it is zero.
If the US properly got rid of pennies (instead of Trump just doing another end-run around congress, by ordering the Mint to stop making them, on shaky legal ground), the legislation could easily supersede those state laws.
As far as I can tell the relevant statute is 31 USC §5112, and it does not require the minting of all authorized coins:
“(a) The Secretary of the Treasury *may mint* and issue only the following coins: ... (6) ... a one-cent coin that is 0.75 inch in diameter and weighs 3.11 grams.”
(Emphasis mine)
There may be another clause somewhere that requires the Treasury to issue all coins, but that seems unlikely to me. The _number_ of coins to issue of each type is left to the discretion of the Treasury; why wouldn't that include the option to issue none?
I addressed in another reply that "'none' is all that's necessary" is probably a defensible interpretation of the law (the more relevant portion being in 5111 rather than 5112), but the penny being explicitly listed makes it clearly not the intention of congress. That's why I said it's a "shaky" and not "baseless" legal ground. The law is clearly written with the expectation that there will be some, which is why Congress felt the need to pass the Coinage Act of 1857 to phase out the half cent.
I think we should get rid of the penny, but it's Congress's responsibility to do that, and they haven't. I'm opposed to Congress abdicating its power and responsibility like that.
5111(a)(1) says “shall mint and issue coins” but qualifies it explicitly with “in amounts the Secretary decides are necessary to meet the needs of the United States”. This is a clear delegation of authority.
If you don't think zero pennies is a permissible amount, what about one penny? Two? What minimum number are you arguing for here, and what's your justification for it?
If Congress had wanted to set a minimum number, they could have done so.
Reading it as ”shall mint” is wrong, I think. “Shall” qualifies the whole clause “mint in amounts the Secretary decides (etc.)”.
Understood that way, 5111 makes it unlawful to mint any pennies if the Secretary decides that none are necessary.
> If Congress had wanted to set a minimum number, they could have done so.
I don't think this is necessarily a sound argument. The current presidency is full of examples of aspects of laws being used in ways no president previously had. Those laws existed, but I don't think it follows that congress intended for those powers to exist.
If Congress had wanted to get rid of the penny, they would have done so, since they specifically have the power to “coin money” under Article 1, Section 8.
In fact they have introduced a bill to do just that, that has not passed yet, which means they have not done that.
Article 1, Section 8 of the constitution gives Congress the authority responsibility to coin money. And in the coinage act of 1792, 31 USC 5111(a)(1), congress directs that the treasury "shall mint and issue coins described in section 5112 of this title in amounts the Secretary decides are necessary to meet the needs of the United States", with the list in section 5112 explicitly listing the penny (31 USC 5112(a)(6)). It's clearly intended to instruct the treasury to mint pennies without congress needing to proscribe the varying amount every year. It also clearly demonstrates the intent that pennies "shall" be produced.
The fact that all of that gives leeway for "'none' is all that's necessary" is why I said the legal basis was "shaky" and not "baseless". I think getting rid of pennies is good, but this is something that Congress needs to do, rather than continually abdicating its responsibilities.
Exactly. I believe the treasury will continue minting commemorative pennies, which would even not make it "none" and give a stronger argument that "well yeah we are meeting the [numismatic] needs"
> The United States is the only country that prints all denominations of currency in the same size. The US and Switzerland are the only two countries that use the same colors for all of their various bills. Needless to say, this sameness of size and color make it impossible for a blind person to locate the correct bills to make a purchase without some sort of assistance, or confirm that he or she has been given the correct change by the sales clerk. Even people with partial sight may have trouble distinguishing a $1 bill from a $10, especially if the bill is old and worn.
> The United States is the only country that prints all denominations of currency in the same size
Let me assure you that all Canadian banknotes are the same size too, 6.00 inch × 2.75 inch (152.40 mm × 69.85 mm). I'm not sure how the article got this fact wrong.
As a Canadian, I'm amused to hear this because it is basically true as a first approximation.
Random factoid - Canadian coins ($2, $1, $0.25, $0.10, $0.05, $0.01 (withdrawn)) come in almost the same denominations as US coins ($1 (uncommon), $0.05 (rare), $0.25, $0.10, $0.05, $0.01), and they are the same diameter and thickness, but maybe having different weight and magnetic properties. It's kind of scary that Canadian coins are essentially state-sanctioned counterfeits of US coins.
Another weird thing is that the National Basketball Association (NBA) has 29 American teams and 1 Canadian one... making it more of an international basketball association. I think another sports league with "national" in its name also crosses national boundaries.
If you take a random person and teleport them between a random mix of Canadian and US cities, I think they'll find it hard to tell the two countries apart. The primary language is English, the accent is the same, the streets and buildings look the same, people watch/listen/read much of the same media, and so on.
One party trick that I practice when traveling in America is to not volunteer information about where I'm from, and see how long I can blend into groups of people and conversations until someone suspects something or asks a direct question. Needless to say, I can last pretty long, and even debated things like US federal politics. The internal diversity of people within the US (e.g. skin color, accent, beliefs) really helps an outsider like me blend in.
Also note that there is a one-way relationship going on. Canadians know more about the US than what's necessary for life. Heck, even the state broadcaster CBC will put out entire news segments (e.g. 5 to 20 minutes) on US-specific issues. Knowing about the US - whether it's major companies, cities, TV series - is unavoidable to Canadians. But ask the average American about anything related to Canada, and you'll likely get a blank stare.
However, some of the differences between Canada and the USA include: Guns(!), personal and state violence, healthcare, social safety net, political polarization, income, prestige, number of big companies, French language, atmospheric climate.
> If you take a random person and teleport them between a random mix of Canadian and US cities, I think they'll find it hard to tell the two countries apart. The primary language is English, the accent is the same, the streets and buildings look the same, people watch/listen/read much of the same media, and so on.
On the surface, I agree 100%. Dig deeper and the differences are stark.
Years ago I came from Australia to work at a ski resort in the US. I stayed 6 months, had a great time. At the end I went to Canada to see a friend. After 30 minutes in Canada I felt more at home than after 6 months in the US.
Canada is a friendly, kind, gentle place, everything the US is not.
I’ve now lived in Canada for 20 years, been to almost every province and territory. I’ve also and travelled extensively in the US (40+ states). It’s a fun place to visit and parts are spectacularly beautiful, I do not want to live there. Now I have a young daughter it’s doubly so.
Yes, I’m generalizing and using broad strokes. The thing about generalizations is they’re usually right.
Canada feels like being surrounded by friends and family, I have no doubt the expression “dog eat dog” comes from the US.
As I was driving my daughter to daycare this morning I saw the garbage men. A road worker filling in pot holes, a person holding the stop sign and someone digging a hole in the road. They all have the same healthcare I do. Canadians all pay taxes, and work together for the betterment of everyone, and it shows.
It’s a community, a society people are happy strangers have a good standard of living.
The US is a competitive sport where everyone is competing with everyone else. Driving past a lowly person holding a stop sign it’s just literally “sucks to be them” and no ability to help or do anything about it.
There are 30 million people in the US without health insurance. There are none in Canada. Medical issues are the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US. In Canada there are none.
Obviously health care is just one example, and there are plenty of kind and friendly people in the US. But living under conditions like that is not a happy, healthy society of people that care about strangers and care for each other. It’s a “look out for me” place.
The more I go there (I was down there last week), the more I see the vast majority of Americans live in a scarcity mindset. Of course the high GDP means not scarce in terms of consumption, but in terms of things that actually impact quality of life day to day.
Sounds like a lot of projecting... The U.S. doesn't have single-payer healthcare therefore it's a dystopian hell-scape where everyone hates each other.
> “sucks to be them”
There are large swathes of the US where I would be shocked to hear anyone express that sentiment. There are other parts where I would not be shocked, but then the US is 10X bigger than Canada so you do get to pick and choose which version you'd like to be part of.
Of course healthcare is just one example of many, and as I said originally, yes I’m generalizing a very large country and population.
I’m giving my observations over 20 years in Canada and exploring the us extensively.
> so you do get to pick and choose which version you'd like to be part of.
Thank you, you have proved my point better than I did.
You literally just said “there are parts of the country where my fellow countrymen, People who make the country function, have families , hopes and dreams have a crappy life. I just choose not to be there”
That is my point exactly. The us is not a community where people care for each other. They just ignore or move away if they can.
Presumably that's "I think another sports league with "national" in its name also crosses national boundaries." in the OP.
With the recent conclusion of the "World" Series, my mind actually went to the Blue Jays first, but they're in the American League. At least that one's technically correct.
It's a bit odd that the mint doesn't emboss the denomination in braille on each note. I'd think that there would be a way to do that and have it hold up pretty well in circulation?
I think I've seen that blind people in the US have a little machine that they can use to add the braille themselves. Also from a quick google search there's also electronic bill readers that can be provided to blind people for free if they qualify.
In Canada the bills are embossed with braille by the mint. There may be other accommodations too, but I haven't looked it up.
In canada it's "one cluster of dots = $5, two clusters = $10, three = $20" and so on. You just feel the number of dot clusters & count, no braille involved.
It's wild to see you downvoted. Only about 10% of blind people know braille. There are many more people who have visual impairments but are not blind. Braille is not a universal solution (though I would rather have it than not have it).
Chiming in to complain that a good, working solution to a problem just doesn't happen to solve ALL PROBLEMS is just banality or perhaps pedantry. Unless it was also proposing an alternative that might do better...
Braille on money also doesn't help dyslexic quadrplegics with dysesthesia... Checkmate.
I think that's an extremely ungenerous read here. The thread is about how different size bills and different color bills solve a lot of problems with people who have low vision. Adding braille solves the same problem, but for a subset of people that different sized/color bills solves.
If you have a good, working solution that's widely used worldwide, and someone suggests a worse solution that works for fewer people, it's more than fair to point out that "your solution is worse, less common, and works for fewer people".
Your last sentence is a low effort strawman, I'm not sure why you felt it necessary to include.
> The US and Switzerland are the only two countries that use the same colors for all of their various bills.
Factually absolutely incorrect for Switzerland, and easy to verify. Swiss bank notes are and have been some of the most colorful (and pretty, I should say) around, and all have different sizes.
From dealing with Euro notes, I like being able to look down at the money in the wallet and pull the right notes out based on color. With USD I need to take the bills out of the wallet.
Which is great if you are fully abled! But for folks for whom sight isn't as strong, additional aids (different colors, different sized banknotes for different denominations) are super helpful.
One thing about accessibility and usability, is that when you design something for the minority it tends to make things better for the majority. Take ramps for example, they not only server those in wheel chairs, but also families with strollers and elderly with walkers.
Does the Canadian solution of adding brail to the notes inconvenience you, or is that an acceptable way to make sure that people with disabilities can participate in cash transactions safely?
Does having different sized coins strike you as an inconvenience?
Why does a feature that can be used by anyone, regardless of disability, strike you as "inconvenient for almost everybody"?
What, exactly, is inconvenient about having notes be different sizes?
Different sized bills are harder to stack in a wallet. Braille is a much better way to handle the problem. No cost to the majority, while solving the problem for the minority.
It seems like having equivalent sized notes is just your personal preference, and that you are projecting that as an inconvenience onto "the majority". Based on the comments it seems like even people without disabilities mostly don't care, or actually think that it is a good feature.
For my side, even if I did agree with your preference, I am perfectly willing to deal with the incredible hardship of slightly different sized notes in my wallet in exchange for a society where disabled people need not fear being ripped off.
For (very fancy) cloth/paper bills like American ones, some counterfeiters wash the inks out of $1 bills to make $100 ones. Only possible if the $100s are the same or smaller size.
Quite the opposite. As a fully abled person I find it incredibly annoying to have to flip through US notes instead of just immediately picking out the right one by size and/or color.
Use a wallet with a divider, and sort your bills. Won't have to flip through until you carry several each of five or more denominations. If you regularly do, then use two dividers.
It seems like a roundabout way to reduce the impact of a symptom of a self inflicted problem.
It's clearly not a solution, and it seems like it's a suggestion that can only come from a place of "but we've always done it this way" without experiencing a world without the problem.
Even if 5s and 10s are the only ones mixed together, I still have to look for a number. In every other currency you just… immediately take the right one.
That's not even taking into account that wallets are getting smaller and smaller as people need to bring them less. So adding dividers would be like acquiring George Costanza's wallet.
Hell, if they're different size you can even feel the value of a loose note in your pocket.
> Once the design and substrate were chosen, the Bank of Canada negotiated a contract with Note Printing Australia (NPA) for the supply of the substrate polymer and the security features implemented in the design. The substrate is supplied to NPA by Securency International (now known as Innovia Films Ltd). The Bank also negotiated for the rights to the use of intellectual property associated with the material and security features owned by the Reserve Bank of Australia.
US $1 coins are available at banks but most Americans don't know they exist and if you hand one to a service person as a tip they sneer at you as though you handed them a quarter or foreign money.
There are several US states where, by law, retailers are not allowed to give preferential treatment to credit card paying customers over cash paying ones. Which means, in those states, retailers will be required to always round transactions to the cash paying customer's benefit, where in other states the retailer is allowed to round to the nearest 5 cents. This is going to cost large retailers millions.
Interestingly many of them had already put the work into updating the cash register software to allow for this due to the penny shortages during covid.
Let those large retailers put pressure on their suppliers. Prices haven't exactly been stable recently. I really don't think it matters, but if it did (as you claim) then surely some downward pressure is a good thing.
Unfortunately I think this is much easier said than done. No single store is going to want to make this change, because it'll make their prices look higher than the competitors'. It'd require legislation, (and even that'd likely be state-by-state legislation).
It also means a company wouldn't be able to advertise a single price for a product nationwide, since sales tax rates vary by state (and many times even within a state).
Also worth noting that Canada also doesn't include sales taxes.
When we got rid of the half-penny, it was worth more in 2024 cents than the dime is now.
We waited so long past when we should have gotten rid of the penny that now a coin ten times as valuable is also worthless enough that we ought to get rid of it.
The US has too many tax permutations for this to be practicable. Companies would have to make prices a bit higher to accommodate unexpected sales tax increases in some or other jurisdiction.
There's a small industry that specializes in knowing what the sales tax for a particular transaction should be at the moment it goes through.
That would centralize power to the larger taxing authority.
Right now, there's a huge number of elected people in the US who wield real local power through these taxes and other rules that they can make.
It's a headache but we live in the computer age and we can automate administrative things like tax calculation at checkout; we should be using systems to aid decentralization and democratization instead of the opposite.
So how would you propose paying for something that cost $0.40, or would you just like to see all prices be multiples of 25c?
BTW, the reason for wanting to get rid of the penny isn't so much the low purchasing value, but more that they cost more to make (~4c) than their face value, so the government loses money making them. The same is true of nickels.
I was once at a place that had a vending machine that accepted U.S. Currency as well as coupons. I wish I saved one of those coupons and reverse-engineered it and see if it worked on other machines, oh well.
> $1 and $2 coins in wide circulation (instead of worn-out $1 bills).
This has its own pros/cons...
One advantage of $1 bill over coin is the majority of people in US don't need a wallet with zipper to hold coins. Five $1 bills is much less bulky and much lighter than five $1 CAD or five 1€ coins
I would contend that 5 bills are more bulky than 5 coins. The only upside of dealing with US bills when travelling in the US is that you feel like a millionaire when you pull out the massive wad of bills from your pocket.
I mean. I can't remember last time I used cash. Not in the last 5 years that is for sure. Once I paid someone with Venmo as that was the only way they could take it. Other than that time, I don't remember using cash at all. In SF the two only moments I can recall needing cash for is either some old self-service laundromats or funnily, chinatown where most of it is still cash. In fact recently a bunch of locations I go to often have become cashless. So you wouldn't be able to pay cash even if you wanted to. Business that are cash only do it for one reason, and one reason only, and we all know what that reason is. Slowly but steadily the volume of retail consumer cashflow is turning to digital. Cash is not going away today. Many seniors don't want / know how to use digital payments. Trends show we are moving toward all-digital. Probably 10 years from now +95% of retail will be cash-less.
> We eliminated pennies in Canada in 2012 and the transition was a non-issue.
That's because Canada had a plan, thought it through, and rolled it out.
In the US...
“We had a social media post (by Trump) during Super Bowl Sunday, but no real plan for what retailers would have to do,” he said, referring to the president’s February announcement.
We have a deranged old man posting random shit on social media determining federal policy, so of course it's a chaotic shitshow.
Unlike serving as a Republican politician, clowning requires a lot of work and training. It's nothing resembling an unskilled job. Ringling Bros. would do a lot better.
Better is very subjective here. I hate the colorful, plastic, canadian money. It feels toyish, like monopoly money. Whereas USD feels much more nice to deal with.
When I was in university a decade ago, a classmate of mine shared the same name as some high-ranking university staff. The classmate's university email account received some unsolicited confidential messages that were intended for the staff, not him.
Exactly. I was hoping that this law would be the pushback to the overzealous prosecution of DeCSS, people who defeat DRM locks in order to lawfully back up the multimedia data that they already paid for, etc.
I also wonder what the impact of the law is on TPM chips on computers (restricting your ability to boot whatever OS you want), the locked-down iOS mobile app store, etc.
That's because you wrote a for-loop without braces, so it can only contain a single statement, and that single statement is your let().
Here is an equivalent way to write that section of code (and I did test it):
Side note, related to declaring variables but not an issue that you encountered: OpenSCAD does not allow setting the value of a variable more than once. So this code is illegal: Second note is that whenever you introduce a construct such as {union(), difference(), if(), for()}, variables declared within the braces are scoped, so they don't exist between iterations or after the scope ends. However, just introducing braces without a construct does not restrict the variable to the scope:reply