We went out for a meal and discussed the feasibility of sorting the pennies by date using ML. The real gold mine would be that an AI approach might potentially identify numismatic grade pennies and really pay for itself.
[0] https://www.wikihow.com/Hoard-Copper-Pennies
[1] https://moneyning.com/make-money/how-to-cash-in-your-pennies...
Seems very simple and low tech.
You don't need to use ML, you need a comparator of the kind found in 1000s of vending machines.
In practice you need a high fidelity weight sensor and a handful of transistors.
Which works out to just over 25000 metric tons of copper per year used in US coinage.
About 2 million metric tons of copper are used in the US per year. So all coinage represents about 1.25% of US copper consumption, of which quarters are about half.
There are some good reasons to eliminate small coinage, but "it will noticeably help with a copper shortage" isn't really one of them.
I got bunch of coins when I had to use a laundromat in the US once, they only accepted quarters. Exchange $20 at a different machine and get a ton of metal. I suppose its like legacy software.
I heard the newer machines use a combination of methods, including weight and electrical resistance to test if a coin is actually the right one.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/08/25percent-of-us-households-a...
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/05/984475870/unbanked-what-it-me...
"Free" accounts seems like a big US thing because there's lots of competition between a highly fractionated banking industry. Something like 4000 banks in USA and next biggest is Russia with ~400
https://www.helgilibrary.com/charts/what-country-has-the-mos...
Reviewing some traditional French banks and their "mobile" offerings are still 2EUR/month, and students can get a 1EUR/month plan.
For example historically and until fairly recently, most American banks were prohibited from having more than one branch. In total.
That's called unit banking. And that's why you have those small-town American banks, and national chains almost everywhere else.
Obviously, that bank with only one location is much more dependent on the fortunes of its only location. This makes for a hilariously brittle financial system.
For me it's a matter of principle, I use cash because I want businesses to continue accepting cash. I have credit cards and I sometimes use them out of laziness (or for anything over $200 or so, or online...) But if a business refuses cash then I'll refuse to do business with them, because I think they're disenfranchising people who don't have credit cards and I won't support that. Thankfully this is fairly rare.
You should never use a private ATM. They are prime targets for skimmers.
I rarely see someone pay with card at the supermarket and it's most likely a foreigner. Small shops and cafes don't even take cards, only cash and the rare time they do it's only for larger sums.
Also tips are common almost everywhere.
Yes, I've heard all about the benefits of cash on HN, but the millions of man years saved by not standing in line has to be worth something too. One Auchan was boasting that they got line time down to 4 minutes. In NL, anythng longer than 30 seconds is unusual.
If you come to Austrian supermarkets at rush hour, the lines will last several minutes. It not uncommon to hear disgruntled customers (usually old people ironically) yell at supermarket employees to open another till after waiting for ages.
There's a lovely under-appreciated privacy about using cash.
In Germany I paid cash for every casual snack-grade transaction, and some bigger ones like restaurant meals. It seemed totally normal and I was happy with that.
In Denmark I never saw the currency at all and I have no idea what it looks like. I never used it and I never saw anyone else use it. Contactless everywhere.
I much prefer cash and regret its disappearance from use in my own country - we are about half-way between the German and Danish experiences above, perhaps closer to the Danish end. A holiday in Germany felt more like a holiday because of this detail. What it feels like when you actually live there is another question.
But this stuff about cash is something of a distraction from the question of metal use - it's increasingly apparent that although electric cars may be an improvement on oil-driven ones, they are not in any useful way the solution. Being rid of cars and basically all powered individual transport may be both dreary and extreme, but what alternative is there?
Anthropomorphic global climate change is absolutely a real problem and we should do more to reduce carbon emissions. But reliable, high-speed personal mobility has brought about a tremendous improvement in quality of life. There's no way I'll agree to give up owning personal cars.
Nah. I used to hope that moving propulsion to the electric grid would allow us to use renewables to drive transport and so do it all for almost nothing. And I also thought that it was vital to sell a solution, to come up with replacements that people would not just accept but actively choose. And that these could lead to a sustainable world.
But it's not true. It's wishful thinking, the dreamer's position, it's the ideological one. The scientific position is that none of this is remotely enough, for reasons like those discussed in the article above. Cars will be got rid of, one way or another - we don't have the resources to sustain them except at the cost of, well, us. The question is just whether we can find a way to sell that idea to ourselves and reorganise ourselves before it happens for us.
As I said, it's dreary and it feels extreme and I don't like it, but I don't see what alternative there is. The brilliant and engaging ideas just don't add up.
Why wouldn't we?
I understand the concerns about everything being logged digitally, but it is just so much more convenient than carrying a bulky wallet with a coin pouch, and messing around with coins at the till holding everyone up for ages. For some reason people think it's a binary choice between privacy or convenience, but it doesn't have to be that way.
I have started going out without my wallet recently, one less thing to lose, and just paying with my phone everywhere.
Meanwhile when you loose your physical wallet, it takes day or weeks, plus trips and legal paperwork to issue new cards, IDs, driver's license, etc. It's a complete nightmare.
In this thread where the assumption is cashless & wallet-less, I have to ask: buying a new phone with what?
Seems like you'd need a friend to spot you a few hundred until you got your access back…
Your bank still issues you physical debit and credit cards, bedside your digital ones, no? Cards which you can leave at home as backup, no?
At least that's the case for me and everyone I know in Europe.
Small shops often prefer or only take cash, or accept card payment only from a certain amount due to fees of the processors. I heard small businesses prefer cash for tax reasons as well.
I can't ask my employer to pay me in cash and keep my payslips private from the government.
Now: while cash is still normal, just about everywhere has contactless credit card terminals. I don’t even get a second glance when I ask to pay with a card at the bakery for a 3 EUR purchase. Some food trucks won’t take cash.
However, we did pay for our 17k EUR used car with cash last year, and that is still the recommended way for private used car sales.
It has gotten better after the Pandemic.
Germans use outdated tech because it works. They use cash very rapidly and efficiently. I’d say Germans handle cash faster than paying with physical cards.
That's not a good argument for progress in general. We'd still be in the stone age with that mentally.
This is also a reflection on the lack of digitalization and IT/tech innovation in Germany and Austria in general vs other European countries that tend to adopt tech earlier.
>I’d say Germans handle cash faster than paying with physical cards.
I'd beg to differ when there's lots of change and coins involved.
Some could be fast with an abacus but that doesn't mean we're not all better off with pocket calculators.
Like with many things, just because that's how Germany does a thing, doesn't mean it's great.
But I think people miss how well do things work in Germany despite the low (IT) tech. I didn’t understand it until I moved here.
//edit: Cashless might imply debit card is accepted, but not necessarily credit cards. Though these are catching up.
For groceries at the usual chains (Edeka, Lidl, Aldi,...) cashless always works, and from my POV always did. For a while many stores only accepted cashless for sales above 10 Euros, but I only know one shop that still has that antique rule. In the past paying by card was something you did for "bigger" expenses; I'm young enough to only have witnessed how that seems to have phased out, but I definitely got strange looks when I payed for an inexpensive item by card. These days most cashiers don't blink an eye when I do so for a <1 Euro item.
As a rule of thumb, the more expensive a place is and the less shady (as in "might cook the books" or "not a drinking hole"), the more likely it is to accept cashless. The "expensive" barrier is coming down ever since: 15 years ago I might have needed cash for a restaurant with the average dish costing 20 Euros, or going out with friends to drink. These days it's safe to assume "if customers are expected to sit down, and pay 10 Euro+, then cashless is probably accepted". Exceptions apply, like that one, new (post-COVID!) restaurant, which insists on cash; and also I go to other places like I did two decades ago while being a pupil or student.
When I go out in our city (six digit populace) I usually assume that I can pay cashless, though if I know the next ATM to be unpleasently far away, I make sure that me or a companion has enough cash, just in case. I still pack some cash when venturing into an unknown town/city.
Overall, I think due to COVID more cusomters now use the option to pay cashless; the only huge impact in acceptance (that I noticed) seems to have been bakeries around here.
It's important to remember that, while Germany is about the size of one of the US's states, it's much more densely populated and has vast differences in customs, traditions and subtile social norms like cash vs cashless.
But most seriously, cash payments enable tons of tax fraud, especially by business owners in the hospitality industry, making it unfair to those with jobs who pay nearly half their salary in tax, while Gastro owners will buy another Porsche or vacation home from the taxes they dodged thanks to cash payments.
I hope they ban cash, it's annoying, time wasting, environmentally unfortunately and makes life super easy for tax fraudsters to the detriment of those who have to pay their taxes fairly.
The privacy reason is some hypocritical bullshit, as those same people using exclusively cash, carry privacy invasive Apple/Android phones and constantly use spying services of Google, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Tinder, Snapchat, etc. The real "privacy" they're referring to means privacy from the taxman for their illicit financial gains, a.k.a. tax fraud. That's the real reason, and I hope it gets cracked down.
Later, I handed the cashier two twenties and change was dispensed from a mechanical dispenser. Took ten seconds or so, plus or minus.
No, I don't use any of those shitty products you mention.
In what universe
No need to create more CO2 for the packaging and transport of groceries to your door if the supermarket is on your way from work anyway. Plus you get to pick the exact fruits and veggies you like yourself.
I assume you have a US viewpoint where grocery delivery is common but this is not a thing for consumers in Austria outside of the capital. It also costs extra so there's that.
Either you vastly exaggerate the time savings of card payments, or credit card machines in your community are more reliable than what we have here. Don't brag too hard about living in the future, however, because here we often have the option of self-checkout, which typically is faster than even looking at a cashier. (Unless one of the oldsters who annoy you so has wandered into that lane and now contemplates the scanner as if it were the cockpit of the Space Shuttle. In that case one might offer assistance? Most of our self checkouts take cash!)
The day will come when all purchases will require the approval of several more parties than the buyer and the seller. We will not enjoy that circumstance, so people wiser (and perhaps less hurried?) than you will use cash as long as we can.
Plus conservative population that is skeptical about new tech and strongly keeps outdated ways of working and doing business (visible in any company there). Letters are common as well and digitalization is pretty weak.
Like what's the last tech product you remember that came out of Austria?
https://www.deltadental.com/us/en/tooth-fairy/the-original-p...
Culture?
I tip in cash, so that taxes aren't taken out of an already underpaid person's "wages".
EDIT: Darn, can't delete now. Yes I agree, the penny should be eliminated to save on copper.
Billions are produced per year, not millions. The mint makes on average 10 billion pennies per year, https://qz.com/1318203/making-pennies-costs-the-us-mint-mill... Varies by year.
It is still a totally irrelevant amount of copper.
One penny has 2.95g of copper in it. 10 billion pennies have 30,000 tons of copper in them. Worldwide copper production is 20 million tons. 0.015% of the world's copper is used for pennies. That's a rounding error.
Just because a number is big, doesn't mean it matters.
Sure. Get rid of the penny. But not because it will impact our copper supply in any way.
There’s always some bigger problem you can point to that seems to render the point at hand useless, but as they say, 30K tons of copper saved is 30K tons of copper earned.
This attitude is exactly why our planet is dying. Instead of investing time and effort into things that matter, people become hyper-focused on worthless things that have no impact. Like measures to conserve a trivial amount of water at home.
It's a poisonous and wasteful way to think.
> There’s always some bigger problem you can point to that seems to render the point at hand useless
That's simply not true. We have real problems to solve. The numbers are clear. This isn't one of them.
Still pretty insignificant, though.
Yes, the 1 cent coins have little copper, but multiple millions are produced per year. The others have a copper core. With current inflation, 1/5/10 cent coins cannot buy anything.
The only reason for the 25 cent coin are vending machines.