General

A Penny’s Worth Of My Thoughts

The folks over at The Corner are debating the merits of phasing out the penny (there are several posts–just scroll down or control-F for “penn”).

Most seem to favor keeping it, and make all kinds of arguments for it, few of which I find compelling, and most of which are, in my humble opinion, at base a simple conservative resistance to change, them being conservatives and all. One last holdout was Peter Robinson, who was swayed to the pro-penny side by the following flawed argument:

A penny is to money as entropy is to thermodynamics. When you spend money, you get some useful work (the stuff you bought), some useful left over energy (large change), and some energy lost to entropy (pennies). Sure, if you get enough pennies together, you can make most of them useful, but some will always be lost to the pavement, cracks between the cushions, and not having quite enough to fill a roll of pennies.

Just as you can’t get rid of entropy in thermodynamics, I don’t think you’ll ever be able to get rid of fiscal entropy; the most you can do is turn nickels into the new unit of entropy.

Sorry, I don’t find the “entropy” argument compelling. If it were true, then if a hundred to the dollar is good, a thousand to the dollar would be better. Why stop there?

Face it, any choice of the smallest denomination of currency is going to be arbitrary. While it would be nice to see some deflation a la Ramesh, it’s a dangerous path to get there, and at the current valuation of the dollar, pennies really are useless.

I’d say that a reasonable criterion for when a coin has too small a value is when it’s not possible to purchase anything with a single one of it. A penny may still buy thoughts, but there’s nothing else that it can purchase in today’s society, since the demise of the penny gumball machine.

Away with it.

General

A Penny’s Worth Of My Thoughts

The folks over at The Corner are debating the merits of phasing out the penny (there are several posts–just scroll down or control-F for “penn”).

Most seem to favor keeping it, and make all kinds of arguments for it, few of which I find compelling, and most of which are, in my humble opinion, at base a simple conservative resistance to change, them being conservatives and all. One last holdout was Peter Robinson, who was swayed to the pro-penny side by the following flawed argument:

A penny is to money as entropy is to thermodynamics. When you spend money, you get some useful work (the stuff you bought), some useful left over energy (large change), and some energy lost to entropy (pennies). Sure, if you get enough pennies together, you can make most of them useful, but some will always be lost to the pavement, cracks between the cushions, and not having quite enough to fill a roll of pennies.

Just as you can’t get rid of entropy in thermodynamics, I don’t think you’ll ever be able to get rid of fiscal entropy; the most you can do is turn nickels into the new unit of entropy.

Sorry, I don’t find the “entropy” argument compelling. If it were true, then if a hundred to the dollar is good, a thousand to the dollar would be better. Why stop there?

Face it, any choice of the smallest denomination of currency is going to be arbitrary. While it would be nice to see some deflation a la Ramesh, it’s a dangerous path to get there, and at the current valuation of the dollar, pennies really are useless.

I’d say that a reasonable criterion for when a coin has too small a value is when it’s not possible to purchase anything with a single one of it. A penny may still buy thoughts, but there’s nothing else that it can purchase in today’s society, since the demise of the penny gumball machine.

Away with it.

General

A Penny’s Worth Of My Thoughts

The folks over at The Corner are debating the merits of phasing out the penny (there are several posts–just scroll down or control-F for “penn”).

Most seem to favor keeping it, and make all kinds of arguments for it, few of which I find compelling, and most of which are, in my humble opinion, at base a simple conservative resistance to change, them being conservatives and all. One last holdout was Peter Robinson, who was swayed to the pro-penny side by the following flawed argument:

A penny is to money as entropy is to thermodynamics. When you spend money, you get some useful work (the stuff you bought), some useful left over energy (large change), and some energy lost to entropy (pennies). Sure, if you get enough pennies together, you can make most of them useful, but some will always be lost to the pavement, cracks between the cushions, and not having quite enough to fill a roll of pennies.

Just as you can’t get rid of entropy in thermodynamics, I don’t think you’ll ever be able to get rid of fiscal entropy; the most you can do is turn nickels into the new unit of entropy.

Sorry, I don’t find the “entropy” argument compelling. If it were true, then if a hundred to the dollar is good, a thousand to the dollar would be better. Why stop there?

Face it, any choice of the smallest denomination of currency is going to be arbitrary. While it would be nice to see some deflation a la Ramesh, it’s a dangerous path to get there, and at the current valuation of the dollar, pennies really are useless.

I’d say that a reasonable criterion for when a coin has too small a value is when it’s not possible to purchase anything with a single one of it. A penny may still buy thoughts, but there’s nothing else that it can purchase in today’s society, since the demise of the penny gumball machine.

Away with it.

Space

The Date Is Set

SpaceShipOne will attempt the first flight to a hundred kilometers on the summer solstice, June 21, about three weeks from today, according to an email from Jim Oberg.

[Update on Wednesday afternoon]

Leonard David has the story.

Here’s the full press release (in response to a question that Duncan Young asks in comments):

Mojave, CA: A privately-developed rocket plane will launch into history on June 21 on a mission to become the world

Political Commentary

Presidential

Senator Kerry displayed the middle digit to a fellow Vietnam veteran who disagreed with his post-service behavior.

In front of schoolchildren.

He also accused him (without basis, as far as I know) of being “a felon.”

[Update on Wednesday afternoon]

I’m going to amend this post to “Newsmax claims that Senator Kerry displayed…” since I can’t find any other sources for the story. I still don’t find it out of character, though.

[Wednesday evening followup]

Here’s some more on the story, but unfortunately, it’s still Newsmax.

General Science

Culture and games

I firmly believe that the single most important area of scientific research is cognitive psychology (the rigorous branch of psych, not the motherlovin’ it’s-just-a-cigar-to-me-but-you’re-a-pervert freudian crap). There’s an interesting article on the results of a cross cultural comparison of behavior in some simple games here. This sort of thing helps get at what human nature really is and what’s just cultural overlay. The results are interesting, and generate more questions than answers, but at least the questions are well posed.

btw, welcome back, Rand. I hope the moving problems resolve painlessly.

Administrative

A Blogger’s Work Is Never Done

I’m back in CA. We didn’t make as much progress unpacking as I’d hoped, and Patricia’s computer didn’t survive the trip to Florida. It arrived sufficiently addled that, upon boot, it shows a crazed scattering of phosphor trails across the screen, though which one can barely make out the Award logo of the BIOS, after which it attempts to load Windows, and then bluescreens with obscure messages in various dialects of Greek and hex. My machine came up OK, but we don’t yet have an internet connection there, or even phone service, so I’ve been cut off from civilization (or, at least, the blogosphere) all weekend. Thanks to Andrew for keeping the ball rolling with some interesting posts.

Because I was away, some of the lowest forms of life imaginable managed to attack my comments section with spam of the most vile nature on Sunday, most of which involved websites hawking variants on b3stiality, r@pe and inc3st, sometimes in varying combinations. Normally, I catch these after the first two or three, after which they’re banned, but my absence gave them free rein for hours and days, and for some reason, MT Blacklist doesn’t seem to remove all comments with banned URLs (at least for me)–it only deletes them one at a time, so I spent the first hour back on line cleaning up the mess. (By the way, Andrew, I don’t get emails of comments to your posts, so you should keep an eye out as well, as they age like fine wine and thus become more attractive to the scumbuckets. If you get one, let me know, and I’ll show you the drill.)

If anyone has any suggestions as to what may have gone astray with the computer, let me know. I’m guessing it’s a MB problem. I’ve had problems in the past while moving equipment in which cables came loose, but it’s hard to imagine how that would cause a weird screen display even before POST.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!