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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 metr
by quantified 11mo ago
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.
Here, it's a question of resolution, with a proven history that transitions screw the consumer, though maybe it won't be so. We're ok with arbitrary hundredths of a dollar, why were we not at thousandths? The American half cent disappeared a long time ago. You still need to include the cents in a tax bill that runs into the millions of dollars.
It's just an awkward stage in inflation. Eventually a US dollar will be worth what a Zimbabwean dollar was, and we won't have $100 bills anymore.
- ekelsen 11mo agoDuring the French Revolution, they tried to make a right angle have 100 degrees and even recomputed all new trig tables for this new standard. It obviously did not catch on :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradian
- rurp 11mo agoThe Indiana pi bill mandated certain mathematical values be changed to the wrong value. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago“The bill, written by a physician and an amateur mathematician, never became law.”
- onraglanroad 11mo agoThere's no reason you can't have 400 degrees in a circle and therefore 100 for a right angle. It's a degree scale: you can choose any number you want.
- ekelsen 11mo agoOf course that's true, that doesn't mean you should.
- taftster 11mo agoBut I can't subdivide 400 in to as many ways as 360. Think about the pie industry. They could be put out of business!!
- hathawsh 11mo agoI usually want to cut pies into 14 pieces. Some might want 11 or 13. (17 is just too many.) I demand that we implement a system where a circle is 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 * 7 * 3 * 11 * 13 = 360360 degrees, so that we can cut pies evenly at anywhere from 2 to 15 slices. If my baker cuts a slice at 25739 degrees, I want a refund! (I'll keep the pie, because the pie is obviously useless.) (720720 might be OK too so we can cut 16 pieces, but honestly, if you're cutting 16 pieces, you're not going to measure. You're just going to divide pieces in half until you have 16. 360360 is the future.)
- DrewADesign 11mo agoIndeed, gradiens are a scale where a circle is divided into 400 equal parts. Really fucked me up a few times when I got a new calculator and wasn’t paying attention to what the little “grad” meant.
- potato3732842 11mo agoWhenever I'm late to a meeting I blame it on the french revolutionary calendar.
- ProjectArcturis 11mo agoLousy Smarch weather
- lexszero_ 11mo agoSome pocket calculators from not too long ago supported this unit for some reason, along with radians and degrees. That's the third option on "DRG" button.
- burningChrome 11mo ago>> and we won't have $100 bills anymore. Heard some pundits on the radio talking about the elimination of the penny and one of them who worked at the Secret Service as an analyst talked about why the US paper money only goes to $100 bills. He said it was to reduce criminals and illicit activity and criminals having to store it. He related the story of Pablo Escobar's brother or cousin who was the accountant for the cartel. He said they were losing billions of dollars every year because of various kinds of attrition like rats chewing up the money, it getting too wet and disintegrating. They were losing so much because they had to store it and that wasn't always the best because they had so much of it on hand which seemed to lend credence to his story. So if you were to get rid of the $100 bills that would further erode the ability of criminals to store so much of it.
- drdec 11mo agoI'm pretty sure the OP was talking about a far future where a $100 bill is worth less than the current penny
- tempestn 11mo agoThough I think the parent means, eventually in the (hopefully) distant future, we'll get rid of the $100 bill because it will be worth too little.
- quantified 11mo agoExactly. Like with the Zimbabwe dollars being printed in billion-dollar denominations, $100 is irrelevant then
- emodendroket 11mo agoThe 500-euro bill is being phased out for similar reasons. Though it's worth noting a 100-dollar bill was worth more than twice what it is today when Pablo Escobar died.
- sunaookami 11mo agoAnd many stores do not accept 200 Euro bills due to the same reason.
- rootusrootus 11mo ago> You still need to include the cents in a tax bill that runs into the millions of dollars Not in all cases. The IRS does not use cents when you file your tax return, they say round to the nearest dollar.
- dpark 11mo agoIt used to be that they gave you the choice. You could round or you could use pennies but you had to be consistent throughout the return, because even the IRS doesn’t care if you manage to scrape out 49 cents. Has that changed and it has to be dollars now?
- ghaff 11mo agoI think my accountant still gives me a choice of what to do and certainly I still get forms with cents on them.
- rootusrootus 11mo agoIt is still a choice, though I cannot remember the last time we used cents on ours or any other returns (my wife works for an accounting firm so they handle a fair number of returns). Just has to be consistent, either you round or you do not.
- pxx 11mo agoNobody 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.
- pbhjpbhj 11mo agoWhich organised religion is demanding a 10 month year?
- conductr 11mo agoSince we’re talking about US monetary policies, I’m going to assume the same religion that thinks the world is only a few thousand years old and dinosaurs are a hoax.
- djtango 11mo agoWe can revisit our notion of the passage of time when we achieve extra planetary life
- conductr 11mo ago> You still need to include the cents in a tax bill that runs into the millions of dollars. No, each number I enter into my tax form is rounded to the dollar. Not just the total, every input value.