I'm using euro cents as weights in my weighted vest.
When I started doing this I didn't want to afford dedicated weights as it seemed like a waste of money, but I had many cents saved up from my childhood, which I started to use instead.
I have roughly 15kg in euro cents in my vest and I'm regularly talking walks with it.
To get one kilo you need 435 cents and it turns out that in Germany you can also "buy" coins "for free" at the "Bundesbank", that is, you can exchange actual money for weights without any fees. You give 4 euros and 35 cents and you get a kilo. Once you need the money back, you can also sell those coins back to them for free.
Sand is not an infinite resource. It's crucial for both protection (if you remove all the sand from the beach, there will be nothing to cushion the waves and currents and etc. and it will result in more erosion, which can be deadly for any constructions nearby) and construction.
As such, it's completely normal that you can't just take sand or stones from many beaches. The very famous Étretat town in France with its accompanying beach and rocks, have a very strict "don't take souvenirs from the beach because you'd be actively destroying it" policy.
Sometimes someone has paid money to place the sand at the beach because it wasn't a sand beach from the start. So no, you can't go fill your sacks with sand anywhere you like, not even in Sweden were we can pick berries in the forest for free. Stones, trees and sand is not allowed without permission.
I don't mean to argue that it's just gimmick and any sane person would just use sand, but to be completely fair, sand is much less dense than steel, so if the coins pack well it does make a better weight.
I do also suspect that there must be some product that must be more cost effective than coins but denser than sand, but cannot think of it right away. I mean, scrap steel is a couple of cents per kg.
Olympic weight plates for barbells. They're widely used, so competition has brought the cost down, and they're easily available in useful increments. I currently see 4x 10lbs for <$50 on Amazon. That works out to 2,53 Euro per kg. So cheaper than euro cents. They may not have the exact shape you need.
The scrap steel probably didn't cost cents per kg when it was sold for its original purpose. You are paying for a useful shape.
A professional equivalent of weighted vests are ballistic plate carriers. Real ballistic plates can be fragile and expensive, so options for exercising in (or milsim games in airsoft etc.) include expired (and failed to re-certify) real ballistic plates, made for purpose training plates... or plate shaped sandbags!
Sometimes sand + water is used for ballast. Depends on your use case, if your heavy thing is moving around then the sloshing won't be ideal, but if it's just sitting somewhere static then it can work.
eg; weighing down the corners of a beach tent, pegs won't grip in the sand so instead tie plastic bags onto the guy ropes and fill them with sand and water.
I have to ask, how do you not sound like ~6500 coins jingling together as you walk? I notice when I have like 10 coins in a backpack. Do you wrap bundles of coins in cellophane or something?
I remember back when I used physical coins, banks used to wrap them in paper rolls with known quantities in them. So you could get a $10 roll of ten $1 coins or whatever.
Could you explain more? I do not understand how you can buy coins for free by paying coins for “weights” (what are these weights? What are they made from?). Also, what is the use for this? To check of your coins are real? Calibrate your coin scale?
I guess OP means you don't need to buy above or sell below its value when "buying" or "selling" a metric shitton of small coins (like you would for gold for instance).
15 kilograms sounds excessive though, I bet the bank clerks hate that trick ;)
Banks usually stock pre-counted rolls of coins, and it's not much hassle to count out several of those. Though I guess 15 kg is probably going to be several dozen.
Excuse the nerdy nitpick, I get the point but technically as far as "actual" money goes that's the coins. Electronic entries in bank ledgers are not legal tender.
One can of course go further and question if banknotes and coins should be called actually money. Today the nominal value is completely disconnected from what the metal is really worth, it's not like with gold coins back in the day. And once collective belief in the value is lost fiat money quickly becomes worthless. Zimbabwe and Venezuela are recent examples.
Have to correct your nitpick. What you're talking about is currency not money. Not being legal tender doesn't mean it's not money. The majority of money sits as electronic entries in each country's central bank. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/currency.asp#:~:text=Th....
True. I'm talking about private bank books, the kind of "electronic money" regular people use, which I assume is what the comment above referred to. Since only financial institutions have access to central bank accounts.
The decathlon weight 500g pakets of sand)jacket is about €20.
How easy is it to make your jacket 10kg? Are the coins easily removable? Do you have straps to keep the weight 'tight'?
It's very easy. I'm using the cheapest weighted vest that I could find and it came with blue bags that I've just filled with coins. You don't really need straps to make the weights tight because the money just kind of spreads inside of the bag and doesn't move at all once it's there.
It's on my todo list to 3d print some containers to replace the bags with actual "money rolls" so that I can remove them more easily.
Maybe you've already considered and decided paper wouldn't work, or maybe you want the fun of working with a 3D printer, but my initial thought:
Would it not be simple to create rolls of coins by simply wrapping a sheet of paper round a stack of them, once or twice around, a little bit of sellotape to hold the paper in place, including folding it over at both ends and taping there too? I'd imagine an A4 sheet would be more than enough for each stack of coins, cutting off what isn't needed, and since you wouldn't care about them being beautiful you wouldn't even need fresh paper and could just use paper that would otherwise go into recycling/trash (letters received, junk mail, etc.)
edit: I did a quick search which both confirmed people have made coin rolls using simple paper, and also that it's highly likely banks will offer pre-made paper holders for the various coin sizes that you can just ask for and get for free (with the bank assuming you'll be bringing them back full of coins - you could either ask for as many as you need, or just one per size and use it as a template for making more from plain paper like this guy does: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AvsOkp_WPxY )
That's a very good point. I wonder about the durability of a paper based solution, but 3d printed rolls might also be suboptimal in that regard. This needs some experimentation.
I'd imagine that if paper alone wasn't strong enough for long term use, using sellotape to cover the entire roll such that the whole thing has a layer of tape on top of the layer of paper would make them pretty durable and add very little time and cost to it. (But I've not done anything like this, so my guessing could be bullshit - happy experimenting!)
It's a vest that you can fill with stuff to increase the intensity of a workout.
There was a time in my life when my legs started hurting and shaking from muscle atrophy because I was programming too much and moving too little.
I was looking for a way to fix that issue and I didn't want to waste time going to a gym, so I started talking walks with a weighted vest. Walking is nice because you can think while walking and with a weighted vest you don't have to walk for hours for it to have a useful effect on your body.
For information, the current research shows that the intensity of the exercise is much less important than the duration. So if you did so little exercise that you get muscle atrophy, a weighted vest isn't going to do much for you.
Anyone who has actually done both low-intensity exercise, e.g. walking, and high-intensity, e.g. heavy compound lifts, will tell you that statement needs a lot of additional caveats.
You’re gonna need to provide a source to that. For caloric burning? Sure, I’d agree. For cardiovascular health? Eh, the answer lies in the middle. For strength and muscle building? No, quite the opposite really. At some point the intensity of an exercise is so low it provides no meaningful muscle stimulus.
haha yeah nah. This needs a lot more additional context and caveats.
If I'm working on increasing my deadlift's 1rm, doesn't matter if I practice deadlifting for 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, but never go above 10% of my current 1rm
It's a way to increase the risk of injury to your knees and ankles and strain your back and shoulders while taking walks, and in general make walking more unpleasant.
If you're injuring yourself by walking around with a few extra kilos then you are so, so hilariously out of shape that any advice you can give is competely disregardable.
I avoided injury when backpacking through the Himalayas by tying helium balloons to by backpack for neutral buoyancy. Had to make slight adjustments as altitude changed, but it all worked out. I had my porter carry the helium tanks.
The risk of injury while walking in a weighted vest is not much higher than walking normally. A very high weight of vest is probably ill advised, but walking on a very flat/regular surface for long periods is far more damaging than walking with a little extra weight. Weighted bracelets/limb weights are dangerous though, and shouldn't be used unless you know what you're doing and take care not to move too quickly and put excess strain on joints.
How much weight on a weighted arm band is considered dangerous? I'm considering 500 gram bands for my arms, that's just about twice the weight of a cellular phone today.
It depends on what you're doing, but 500g shouldn't be dangerous as long as you wear the weights tightly bound so they don't bounce or slide. What you want to watch out for are anything that overextends or puts pressure on the joints - those movements can cause damage even unweighted and having weights just makes the danger worse.
I'd be worried about blisters/rashes/rubbing if the weights slide around. I use an exercise-bike like device and realised I was getting a blister on my hands from the constant motion of the grip.
Ehh, I've been doing fitness boxing and knockout home fitness (Nintendo switch) with 1.5 kg wrist/hand weights for ages now, no issues to speak off. I think he's taking about the 2-5kg weights, these are way more dangerous then you'd expect from wearing them. (I did that for a while, after getting slightly In shape - at least until I read up on it)
Strong recommendation for Nintendo switch for baseline fitness btw, these games are great for a 1-2 day 20 minutes workout/week for unfit office workers. Way better experience then the equivalent VR games.
I don't play too much VR these days, but enjoyed Beat Saber for "stationary movement", Gorn for beating up stuff and the VR ports of the original Serious Sam games for "run and shoot like a maniac".
These can be pretty physically challenging too!
my issue with arcade style games for fitness is that they stop whenever you fuck up. That's not really great when your goal is to get moving for ~20 minutes or so.
The one's I've currently got installed on my quest 3 are
Supernatural Fitness (I need a VPN to play because they're geolocking it to USA).
I find the way they try to "get personal" with the trainer super awkward.
FitXR (only one with decent passthrough gameplay)
I dislike how most exercises are centered around "gyms", whenever you enter a session, there are others around you doing the same exercise as you and you get a scoreboard. It really doesn't vibe with me whatsoever. I also don't believe that I almost always get first or second place - I'm pretty sure this is showing you numbers to make you feel good about yourself.
XR workout
It's the most "indie" of these and with the highest difficulty ceiling. It's biggest downfall is that it doesn't really give you a generated "I wanna exercise for 20 minutes" button. At least I couldn't find it.
There are also others, but I don't have them installed. I.e. Les milles etc
But as I said before: purely from a workout perspective, the Nintendo games work way better in my experience.
It's just so awkward in VR compared to Knockout Home Fitness, worse signalling what you need to do next - you're wearing a headset while getting sweaty - no center stage youre watching, instead youre just trying to guess which movement you're supposed to do while things randomly float around.
Your body weight varies by more than that during the course of a normal day. Carrying 1kg should not increase any sort of risk of injury unless you exceptionally weak (as in, have trouble walking at all).
For the same reason, you probably won't see much benefit from such light weight over just walking a little faster or a little further.
The problem is that when you put weight on your limbs you are creating levers and inertia which get transferred to joints in ways those joints are not good at dealing with.
One usually doesn't do much with their arms while carrying groceries, they just hang at the side or move the bag around when putting it down or picking it up. When performing other movements, especially when they are fast or forceful, the extra weight can add momentum that is potentially hazardous, especially if it bounces or moves around (makes it very hard to compensate for reflexively). If present during repetitive tasks, extra weight can increase the risk of repetitive stress injuries occurring.
Some people have no, zero, none understanding of sensible limits. "If X is good then more X must be better" applied to one or more aspects of their life. Hence protein in their diet, vitamin supplements, weight in a vest, and of course, infamously, having a presence on social media.
I went 0' 5' 10' 15, 20kg over 3 years after an embolism.
N=1 (rather like yourself: or you spoke to/ read about people that don't quite understand 'pacing'.
Do you/ them struggle with 1 bag of shopping? I make three or more light(er)trips.
Anecdote from the days switching to the Euro with respect to weights: When I was working at a restaurant with high thoughput at the end of the '90s and early '00 we first had a giant coin sorting machine. That thing was innacurate (hello Egyptian coins of same sizes as ours) due to only measuring size and being not that accurate. Bank notes were counted by hand.
After the introduction of the Euro, all coins were counted in standard sized cups which also fit in the cashiers trays so no swapping needed, the error rate reduced to near zero (at counting, difference between amount on bag and what the bank told us was in it). Also, the machine was 500 grams instead of half a small room.
The same was applied to bank notes, as they also have a standard weight due to standerdized size and production method. This reduced the error rate even further as counting is difficult as it turns out if you want to do it at scale. It also made the task way faster. Theoretically the machine could count the notes in one go, but it mostly reported "error check notes" messages if you did that. Things like thick tape (for repair when the bank note was damaged) was enough to throw it off in some cases.
Those were interesting times, with people buying a 25ct item with a 250 note to not go to the bank to exchange old for new currency. (Fyi, you do not have to legally accept that as the due dilligence needed with high notes would outweigh the cost of the item).
Other anecdote: Also a lot of 50 euro fake notes showed up within months after introduction, easilly cought as they lit up like a freshly washed white shirt under UV light.
> bank notes, as they also have a standard weight due to standerdized size and production method.
LOL, I worked for a bank branch located in a low socio-economic area. The pubs and bars would come in on Monday morning with huge wads of bank notes, wet with beer and whiskey, and it all had to be hand-counted as machines couldn't do it. We then had to bundle up excess notes and heat-shrink wrap them. I'm sure there were some pretty interesting bacterial colonies growing in there!
Soviet coins (at least post 1961) were designed explicitly with this application in mind.
1, 2, 3, and 5 kopeck coins weighed their value in grams. They could also be used to estimate lengths; 1 kopeck was 15 mm in diameter and 5 kopeck was 25 mm.
That's a very cool intentionally usefully design. What's the rationale behind a 3-kopeck coin though? I don't think I've seen a '3' denomination in any other currency.
So I never looked into it closely, but I knew that the 3 and 15 kopeck coins had names of their own of Tatar origin, so it had to have had a long history.
According to wikipedia [1,2,3], as a physical coin it was minted periodically throughout Russian history. The Tatar origin of its informal historical name is either 'gold'[4] or 'six'[5].
It was last introduced in 1839-1841 and persisted into Soviet period, until 1991 when it was discontinued by the newly independent Russia. The 1/2/3/5 weight system had to be of the Soviet design, since the metric system was adopted following the Bolshevik revolution, but the weights and dimensions haven't changed since 1926 [6].
I built a computer vision device that used the top-down area of a penny as a calibration standard. Coins are useful, easy-to-get items that have relatively tight manufacturing tolerances.
Ever since coin clipping got out of hand in the 1700s most coins feature milled edges or edge inscriptions. They make the edges more resistant to wear and make any wear easy to spot.
Of course there's a limit to the precision you can get from coins, but considering the scale of their production and the account of handling they see they are surprisingly good
Our area measurement application did not require that tight a tolerance (we were estimating yield on broken material). If I needed that tight a tolerance, I could have gotten proof coins from the mint, or potentially switched to using a real calibration standard like a gauge block.
I have often, though I suspect not enough to make a significant difference to someone who is already OK with the slight variance between un-worn coins.
Depends on what your tolerances are. If you only need to be within a mm a coin is going to beat that by an order of magnitude.
We use a pack of cigarettes as a gauge for one of the jobs we do. Quick, (not so) cheap, and readily available. May have to standardize on a vape though in the near future.
At one point, I worked out that US dimes, quarters, and half dollars all weigh $20/lb (iirc), which made the task of counting my accumulated change a lot easier.
That's because that was the price of silver. The mint was for many centuries a way to get your precious metals divided into units of standardized weights that were stamped to certify their authenticity, thus facilitating commerce, though frequently rulers succumbed to the temptation of "debasing" them by diluting the precious metals with so-called "base" (in the sense of "low", "contemptible") metals such as tin, lead, and zinc.
So quarters weren't worth 25¢ because the government said so; they were worth 25¢ because they were made out of 25¢ worth of silver.
That's the same reason "peso" means "weight" and the "shekel" and "pound" take their name from units of weight.
This ended in 01965 in the USA, followed by the end of the gold standard, since which the dollar has lost 96% of its value relative to the precious metals that used to define it. The consensus among economists is that this is a good thing because it prevents deflation. I'm not sure.
Off topic, but may I ask why you use a leading zero when writing the year? (01965 rather than 1965)
You're not the only person I've seen do it on this site, and I can't recall ever seeing it not on this site, so I'm wondering if its because you're in the habit (or wanting to be in the habit) for some technical thing you do like working on a database that needs years in that format, or if there's some reason you feel that its better to write them that way in prose?
It's a Long Now Foundation concept [0]. The idea is to encourage people to think on a more civilizational time scale, and avoid another 'millenium bug' problem in ~7095 years.
If you dig into this person’s posting history and also if you read regularly on HN for a couple years you will notice that it is actually this very user that deliberately uses the 0 prefixed 5 digit year numbers, and also goes out of their way to include year numbers into their posts to make people ask this question.
It may not be, but, as I said, economists generally believe it to be important. It's a very noticeable departure from the previous 180 or so years, during which time it had lost about 50% of its value by that standard. I'm not saying, for example, that the US currency will inevitably collapse due to a Zimbabwe-style hyperinflationary spiral, although that is a thing that many fiat currencies have done going back to the Song, nor that commodity money such as silver coinage is immune to inflation—coinage debasement is even older than paper-money hyperinflation.
Economists generally believe that the US's gradual shift from commodity money to fiat money over the period 01932–01971 was beneficial.
But I suspect that the shift to a fiat-money basis may be having some effects on the economy that are not well understood.
I was asking why it is important for the currency value to be reflected in the value of a precious metal. My understanding is that precious metals were used historically because of rarity, the ease of working with them to make currency, and the difficulty of counterfeiting. All of those things can be transferred to modern banknotes, so I wonder what the value making the dollar's market price equal to the market price of a specific amount of metal.
Inflation is something that is generally considered good by economists because it allows for growth. If the money supply is fixed at how much of a certain metal you have mined, then the economy cannot expand without the money deflating. Deflation completely stops growth because no one will lend, and people will be reluctant to spend something that gets more valuable over time.
Right, that's precisely the currently fashionable belief system as I understand it. But I'm not entirely comfortable praising the US economic system in the fiat-money era 01971–02024 by comparison to the previous 53 years, 01918–01971, which were the last 53 years of the commodity-money era there, except for a short break in the 01920s. I think everyone agrees that the US economy developed in a qualitatively better way from 01918 to 01971 than from 01971 to today, and that there was a sort of discontinuity around 01971.
It's possible that the mainstream economists are right, and that things would be far worse without the shift to fiat money, and it's just a coincidence that it happened at the same time everything started falling apart. We don't have anything like a controlled experiment. A lot of things happened to the US around 01971: the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the end of the Apollo program, the War on Drugs, the New Age movement, CREEP, rapprochement with the PRC, the energy crisis, the Clean Air Act, second-wave feminism, Love Canal, etc. Most of these seem like things you'd naïvely expect to reduce domestic economic inequality, though, however detrimental they might have been to the residents of Taipei and especially My Lai. So why did it skyrocket instead?
PG has an innocent explanation: as I understand it, he thinks companies suddenly had to compete for superstars in the job market, abandoning seniority-based pay and thus creating the yuppie and growing wealth inequality. But a plausible alternative explanation is that fiat money rewards elites in nonobvious ways, enabling them to concentrate ownership of the economic base in a smaller and smaller subset of the population. Certainly that was the merit Marco Polo claimed for paper money when he became the first European to describe it in writing.
It's not a widely accepted theory today, more associated with crackpots actually, but it certainly isn't new.
> I think everyone agrees that the US economy developed in a qualitatively better way from 01918 to 01971 than from 01971 to today
I don't think everyone agrees on that. There was a huge crash which posed an existential threat to capitalism in the middle of the first one.
> Most of these seem like things you'd naïvely expect to reduce domestic economic inequality, though, however detrimental they might have been to the residents of Taipei and especially My Lai. So why did it skyrocket instead?
What does any of this have to do with currency policy?
> But a plausible alternative explanation is that fiat money rewards elites in nonobvious ways, enabling them to concentrate ownership of the economic base in a smaller and smaller subset of the population.
Even more plausible than 'post-WWII cold war politics and domestic upheaval due to civil rights, the rise of the middle class, birth control and women getting control over their own lives caused society to shift in unexpected ways and gained reactions from all segments of society which shape our modern world'?
> It's not a widely accepted theory today, more associated with crackpots actually, but it certainly isn't new.
Yet you are doing that thing where it is obvious that you believe this but won't say it openly.
I think it's a worthwhile idea to explore, but most worthwhile ideas to explore are still actually wrong. You can't know which until you explore them, which I haven't done in this case.
Probably you would benefit from learning to engage with people capable of seriously considering ideas without embracing them, because it seems like you're looking for some kind of partisan struggle instead.
Note that the names for the first three coins are all units of subdivision. "Quarter" and "half" most obviously, dime comes from the Latin decima, meaning "one tenth". The equivalent Roman coin was the denarius.
"Nickel" and "penny" break that pattern, with the first referencing the composition of the coin (originally called a "half-dime"), and penny is a measure of weight, varying by locale. The British penny is 1/240 of a Tower pound (later decimalised to 1/100 in the 1960s), whilst an American pennyweight (used for example in reference to nails) is 1/1000th of a pound.
Maybe this was so obvious the author did not write it down, but you can also use this to measure accurately weight of objects below 10 g.
First you make the stacks for 15.0, 15.5, .. 17.5, 18.0. Preferrably using tiny amounts of superglue.
Then you put one stack on one side of the scales, and the other stack on the other side, and you have accurate weights for 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0.
You can make some of these combinations more efficiently, but the more coins you use in total, the better accuracy you get as manufacturing variations average out (up to a certain point of course).
It is a bit more cumbersome to make a quarter gram, but you can make one stack of {5x 0.01, 2x 0.02, 1x 0.1, 1x 0.2} for a weight of 27.46 g, and one stack of {2x 0.02, 3x 0.05, 1x 0.01, 1x 0.2,} giving 27.72 g, for a difference of 0.26 g.
As others have mentioned, using Lego is a nice way to make high precision scales. Take a 1x16 Lego Technic brick with holes and balance it on a thick needle through the middle hole. Needle support can be built from other bricks. Use thin sewing thread and some bricks to hang some 6x8 plates from each end.
I guess it depends on what kind of accuracy you're aiming for. The density/weight of water changes depending on temperature, salinity, pressure, impurities and probably other factors.
So if you're either deep into a volcano or on the top of a cold mountain and need 0.001g precision, you might want to find an alternative way :)
I think the volcano might be useful - we could use the heat to steam distill the water, then on our trip up the mountain we could take a quick stop at sea level to conduct our measurements.
For the USA, an unworn 5 cent nickel weighs 5 grams. When I was testing one of those tiny portable scales that are battery operated, I would use 1, 2, and 3 nickels to determine if it was close to being accurate.
Indeed. Calibrating scales with nickels is a well-known trick in certain circles, including, but not limited to, organic chemistry labs. It won't do for analytic weighing, but for sanity-checking a scale before weighing out reagents, it does the trick.
Ah, good! A few years ago, I picked up a "pocket scale" in a legit head shop. I had intended to weigh out doses of Kratom powder I'd picked up there, too. (The Kratom turned out to be nasty stuff, but the scale works fine, even for weighing postal mail.)
I was considering picking up some accurate weights for calibrating the scale properly, but if nickels will work, I could probably figure out how to procure some nickels instead. Right now, I have a roll of quarters and zero nickels in the house. I was using one to open up my electric candles, but it went missing, so I'm using a dime instead.
Google tells me a 1p coin weighs 0.1257 oz, so nearly exactly 1/8 oz.
I knew someone who got caught by the metropolitan police with a fairly ordinary amount of weed (which probably wouldn't have attracted anything more than a warning), but also with a set of weights. I think he got a suspended sentence in the end. Using coins and something innocuous which could be used as a balance would seem to make sense.
Metric only has an advantage for precision measurements that have to be operated on arbitrarily, not for dividing things. You're usually dividing things in halves, far less often into thirds and even more rarely into fifths. 1/8 oz is an ounce that has been divided in half three times. Or you can think of it as a pound that has been divided in half seven times.
Perhaps a helpful addition: I collected my change money over several years (about 9kg in total, mostly lower valued coins, since the higher values can be spent easily).
After exchanging them on a bank into useful money: the average Euro coin weights about 3.6 grams and has an average value of 7 cents. :-)
Probably not significantly. It would make it too hard to build machines that accept all euro coin variants, yet reject cheaper non-euro coins of similar proportions.
Any additive/subtractive method at that scale for coin faces sounds like a huge waste of time and effort compared to just pressing the design, but also not a coin expert.
Striking/pressing with a shaped die is the traditional process, not least because the material itself used to be the store of value rather than the provenance of the mint— The coin shape was really there to certify how much gold/silver it contained and that the government had been paid whatever tax (seignorage) was owed on the ore.
Now that we’ve lived in a fiat-currency world for decades, it’s possible that new processes are being used as the concerns are different— anti-counterfeiting measures are more important than anti-shaving ones now, for instance.
I think it's worth noting the currency term 'peso' for the money used in a lot of former spanish colonies, directly translated, means 'weight'. For example there's a famous mexican singer of recent who goes by 'peso pluma' and it means featherweight, like the boxing classification, not as much to do with money
It could very well be a pun to do with how he gets money, though. Wiki says he makes narco music, and bird references are common to drug slang in both US English and (Mexican) Spanish.
I was thinking, since the post mentions not being able to get exactly 10g. But you can get 15g/25g exactly, so you're at 10g net by putting them on either side of the scale.
The US uses the metric system, just with very non-standard units. All of the fundamental customary units are defined precisely in SI terms.
The precise five gram weight of the nickel was deliberate, but dates to the Civil War, a time when the US had no intention at all of moving to the metric system. It's rumored that a gram or two of weight was added to the coin on the premise that "five cents five grams" was a nice round number, but actually due to lobbying by moneyed interests who owned a nickel mine, so they could sell more nickel to the government.
> The US uses the metric system, just with very non-standard units. All of the fundamental customary units are defined precisely in SI terms.
"Uses the metric system" = uses standard metric units.
By the logic you lay out, the metric system itself doesn't use the metric system, seeing as the units are not defined by reference to SI terms but to natural constants. (And if your definition of the metric system includes both US customary units and natural constants, then your use of the phrase 'metric system' has ceased to signify anything meaningful.)
> the metric system itself doesn't use the metric system
Of course the metric system doesn't use the metric system. How would that even work?
SI units are, as you point out, defined in terms of measured aspects of reality.
US customary units, on the other hand, are defined in terms of the metric system.
And yes, this means that both of them are grounded in measured aspects of reality. Again. How else could this possibly work? Measuring themselves, perhaps?
If US customary units were defined directly in terms of measurements, then they wouldn't use the metric system. They would only be interconvertible through those measurements, and if they weren't the same measurements, as they easily could not be, this would be an empirical process subject to further experiment and refinement.
But they're not. They're defined in terms of SI, making conversion a matter of arithmetic.
It's a load-bearing statement. I do understand how someone who lacks grounding in the physical sciences might not realize that. Glad to help.
> It's a load-bearing statement. I do understand how someone who lacks grounding in the physical sciences might not realize that. Glad to help.
Condescending and wrong, and all in defence of the facially farcical statement that the US uses the metric system. Not that US customary units are defined in terms of metric quantities, which is the moved goalpost you're now trying to defend, but that "the US uses the metric system".
Whether or not the US 'uses the metric system' is not contingent on what units US customary units are legally defined in reference to, that's merely trivia.* US customary units do not form part of the metric system, and metric units do not enjoy widespread use in the United States (with minor exceptions).
Ergo, the US does not use the metric system.
* And relatively recent trivia at that, US units were naturally not first defined in metric units, only later restated as such.
Whilst exploring what money is, I had the realisation that almost all units of currency are either measures of weight (pound, livre, peso, shekel, penny), divisions of same (denarius, quarter), of quality or its representation (real, crown, dollar, florin. zloty, yen, yuan), or are descriptive of the state in which they're used (bolivar, afgani, euro), though that last is arguably a form of the second.
That is, traditional specie coin currency is standardised for quantity and quality, or at least is initially. Most states have found a need to devalue specie coin, and virtually any state with a sufficiently advanced financial system and institutional trust either settles on a fiat currency or adopts another country's fiat currency as its own standard. kragen is making a similar point here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41895405>.
For the latter, see the U.S. dollar which is either the or an officially accepted currency: Turks and Caicos and British Virgin Islands (both British overseas territories); Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba (all Dutch municipalities); the independent states of Ecuador, El Salvador, Timor-Leste, Federated States of Micronesia, Republic of Palau, and the Marshall Islands; and quasi-official or widespread use in the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Costa Rica, Panama, Bermuda, Myanmar, Cambodia, Cayman Islands, Honduras, Nicaragua, Somalia, and Zimbabwe.
I've developed the view that seignorage, that is, the exchange value in excess of specie value of coinage, is effectively a measure of trust in a currency system, and that fiat currency in paper or even more so as ledger entries (written or electronic) express an extraordinary level of trust in a currency, the more so if that currency is widely accepted internationally.
Another interpretation is that money in a given economic region is the most widely accepted commodity, that is to say, the exchange medium which is accepted preferentially to any other. This need not be a conventional currency (e.g., commodity or symbolic exchange of shells, hides, cattle, cigarettes, alcohol, laundry detergent, etc.), or the official currency of a region (though legal sanction and sanction of discharge of debt go a long way to establishing a currency within a given region). Multiple currencies may trade simultaneously, possibly in slightly differing contexts, and through much of history there has been at least some distinction between retail trade (often copper), wholesale (silver), and capital / government financing (gold). Adam Smith discusses this at great length in Wealth of Nations. Multi-metallic systems often involve variable exchange rates between different classes of money, and I've mused that this might be something worth reintroducing to modern financial systems.
> Multi-metallic systems often involve variable exchange rates between different classes of money, and I've mused that this might be something worth reintroducing to modern financial systems.
How and why? Even as arbitrage is easier to effect as ever? The point of the bimetallic system was that gold wasn't available in high enough quantities for the needs of the economy (monetary mass) and was too valuable for small-denomination coinage. Those aren't problems we currently have…
One of the biggest problems with contemporary monetary theory is that issues at the retail level (wages and household spending) are difficult to address without creating inflationary asset spirals, including most notably of real estate, but also of stocks, other financial assets, and collectables (wines, art masterworks, memorabilia, etc.). One can in fact look to markets and auctions for such assets as one of several signs that monetary policy is in fact misfiring, in my opinion.
Matt Ridley isn't someone whose views I generally subscribe to, but in a Feb 2019 Intelligence Squared (UK) debate with Johan Norberg and David Runciman, Ridley made a throwaway comment that whilst "[m]arkets in goods and services for immediate consumption such as 'haircuts and hamburgers'work very well and efficiently in delivering innovation and efficiency ... markets in assets (goods for hoarding and resale) are 'so automatically prone to bubbles and crashes that it is hard to design them so they work at all'".
This apparently appears in his book The Rational Optimist, I'm finding via a FastGPT query:
I strongly suspect Ridley was citing his own work in that debate, so thanks for prompting me to look that up.
There are various ways in which such iniquities might be addressed. Among the traditional approaches are various income supports, minimum wage, universal basic or guaranteed minimum incomes (UBI/GMI), on the wage side, a land value tax (tax on the unimproved value of land), an asset or wealth tax, and/or a transaction tax (particularly aimed at HFT).
Another possibility though suggests itself in my comment above about status as legal tender. That is, different currencies might be recognised as legal tender (discharging debt) only for a specific set of transactions. Normally we shy from this on efficiency grounds, but it seems to me that there might be a role that could be played especially in separating financial transactions markets from those in quotidian consumption. There are some early variants of this, largely in the form of expiring financial assistance, e.g., a debit card whose balance expires after a given time (1--5 years or so. In the US I believe SNAP benefits (grocery assistance) works this way, and I've heard of similar projects elsewhere. A health savings account in the US (a tax-deferred put-away plan for healthcare expenses not otherwise covered by insurance) is a similar mechanism.
And keep in mind: we're not limited to specific classes of specie (e.g., copper, silver, gold, iron, etc.), but could create and retire entire sets of currencies at will, though I'd suggest at the very least starting with a limited set, and targeting general areas of financial activity, again, wage/retail, wholesale, fiance, government spending (possibly at multiple levels), and international exchange being more obvious candidates.
Related concepts are of insurance or financing of specific assets or transactions. We're in the midst of finding out what uninsurability will mean for real estate markets in disaster-prone areas (wildfires in the US West, hurricanes along the US Gulf Coast and Southestern Seaboard). Paul Baran, co-inventor of packet-switched networks mentioned insurance redlining and its effects on inner-city homeowners and small businesses in a 1968 monograph, "On the Future Computer Era: Modification of the American Character and the Role of the Engineer, or, A Little Caution in the Haste to Number":
James Burke discussed a similar situation (reluctance of funding syndicates to underwrite fancy "new unprooved" technology) in severely retarding adoption of lateen-rigged sailing ships, in the TV series / book Connections. (These had been used for about a thousand years by Arabic and Indian sailors, but weren't adopted in Europe until the 1500s or so.) For specific types of transactions, mandating payment in the appropriate monetary type in order to qualify for insurance or certification might work.
The net effect would still be porous, but even porous systems can be managed so long as they impose sufficient frictions. And yes there might be exchanges between currency systems, but so long as those are also somewhat managed (e.g., with reporting, taxes/fees, etc.) this need not be a free-for-all.
And in the meantime, it would be possible for central banks to inject money into specific sectors of the economy, at least distinguishing between, say, wage/retail, wholesale, and finance, and quite possibly even more finely.
I'm using euro cents as weights in my weighted vest.
When I started doing this I didn't want to afford dedicated weights as it seemed like a waste of money, but I had many cents saved up from my childhood, which I started to use instead.
I have roughly 15kg in euro cents in my vest and I'm regularly talking walks with it.
To get one kilo you need 435 cents and it turns out that in Germany you can also "buy" coins "for free" at the "Bundesbank", that is, you can exchange actual money for weights without any fees. You give 4 euros and 35 cents and you get a kilo. Once you need the money back, you can also sell those coins back to them for free.
You can also go to the beach and get unlimited amounts of weight for free too. That's what's most budget weights are made of
Just FYI this is illegal in many areas.
It's illegal to fill a bucket with sand?!
Sand is not an infinite resource. It's crucial for both protection (if you remove all the sand from the beach, there will be nothing to cushion the waves and currents and etc. and it will result in more erosion, which can be deadly for any constructions nearby) and construction.
As such, it's completely normal that you can't just take sand or stones from many beaches. The very famous Étretat town in France with its accompanying beach and rocks, have a very strict "don't take souvenirs from the beach because you'd be actively destroying it" policy.
Sometimes someone has paid money to place the sand at the beach because it wasn't a sand beach from the start. So no, you can't go fill your sacks with sand anywhere you like, not even in Sweden were we can pick berries in the forest for free. Stones, trees and sand is not allowed without permission.
And remove it from the beach, yes.
No, to walk away from the beach still holding that full bucket.
You would be surprised how many things its illegal to take from beaches or country (sand, corals, some shells, of course anything old enough etc)
I don't mean to argue that it's just gimmick and any sane person would just use sand, but to be completely fair, sand is much less dense than steel, so if the coins pack well it does make a better weight.
I do also suspect that there must be some product that must be more cost effective than coins but denser than sand, but cannot think of it right away. I mean, scrap steel is a couple of cents per kg.
Olympic weight plates for barbells. They're widely used, so competition has brought the cost down, and they're easily available in useful increments. I currently see 4x 10lbs for <$50 on Amazon. That works out to 2,53 Euro per kg. So cheaper than euro cents. They may not have the exact shape you need.
The scrap steel probably didn't cost cents per kg when it was sold for its original purpose. You are paying for a useful shape.
A professional equivalent of weighted vests are ballistic plate carriers. Real ballistic plates can be fragile and expensive, so options for exercising in (or milsim games in airsoft etc.) include expired (and failed to re-certify) real ballistic plates, made for purpose training plates... or plate shaped sandbags!
> That works out to 2,53 Euro per kg. So cheaper than euro cents.
The cents are free though, cause they're legal tender — just deposit them instead of having to sell 2nd hand
Assuming you live in a sane country. One of the few complaints I have with Dutch society being so "streamlined". Cash is seen as a nusciance here.
The cheapest plates can be higher variance than you might expect. I’ve seen reports of 45s that are 10% light.
Especially if you hit eBay or similar, you can get it for cheap
Sometimes sand + water is used for ballast. Depends on your use case, if your heavy thing is moving around then the sloshing won't be ideal, but if it's just sitting somewhere static then it can work.
eg; weighing down the corners of a beach tent, pegs won't grip in the sand so instead tie plastic bags onto the guy ropes and fill them with sand and water.
It's a lot easier to contain coins vs sand, though.
You can keep both in a series of ziploc bags for convenience.
Round coins are also less coarse and rough
For me, it would be rather long trip and generally too expensive. I would had to steal it from kids playground. Which is rather low thing to do.
I have to ask, how do you not sound like ~6500 coins jingling together as you walk? I notice when I have like 10 coins in a backpack. Do you wrap bundles of coins in cellophane or something?
I remember back when I used physical coins, banks used to wrap them in paper rolls with known quantities in them. So you could get a $10 roll of ten $1 coins or whatever.
Ah that is almost certainly it, it's been so long since I've gotten a roll of quarters from a bank that I forgot that is an option. Thanks!
Could you explain more? I do not understand how you can buy coins for free by paying coins for “weights” (what are these weights? What are they made from?). Also, what is the use for this? To check of your coins are real? Calibrate your coin scale?
I guess OP means you don't need to buy above or sell below its value when "buying" or "selling" a metric shitton of small coins (like you would for gold for instance).
15 kilograms sounds excessive though, I bet the bank clerks hate that trick ;)
Banks usually stock pre-counted rolls of coins, and it's not much hassle to count out several of those. Though I guess 15 kg is probably going to be several dozen.
The coins are weights, the actual money is paper or electronic money.
Excuse the nerdy nitpick, I get the point but technically as far as "actual" money goes that's the coins. Electronic entries in bank ledgers are not legal tender.
One can of course go further and question if banknotes and coins should be called actually money. Today the nominal value is completely disconnected from what the metal is really worth, it's not like with gold coins back in the day. And once collective belief in the value is lost fiat money quickly becomes worthless. Zimbabwe and Venezuela are recent examples.
Have to correct your nitpick. What you're talking about is currency not money. Not being legal tender doesn't mean it's not money. The majority of money sits as electronic entries in each country's central bank. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/currency.asp#:~:text=Th....
True. I'm talking about private bank books, the kind of "electronic money" regular people use, which I assume is what the comment above referred to. Since only financial institutions have access to central bank accounts.
How do you pay 35 cent in paper is still a mystery. But OP just means you can exchange/buy coins (and use them as weights)?
You should be just as mystified about the 4€ component.
You give bills and get pennies.
The decathlon weight 500g pakets of sand)jacket is about €20. How easy is it to make your jacket 10kg? Are the coins easily removable? Do you have straps to keep the weight 'tight'?
It's very easy. I'm using the cheapest weighted vest that I could find and it came with blue bags that I've just filled with coins. You don't really need straps to make the weights tight because the money just kind of spreads inside of the bag and doesn't move at all once it's there.
It's on my todo list to 3d print some containers to replace the bags with actual "money rolls" so that I can remove them more easily.
Maybe you've already considered and decided paper wouldn't work, or maybe you want the fun of working with a 3D printer, but my initial thought:
Would it not be simple to create rolls of coins by simply wrapping a sheet of paper round a stack of them, once or twice around, a little bit of sellotape to hold the paper in place, including folding it over at both ends and taping there too? I'd imagine an A4 sheet would be more than enough for each stack of coins, cutting off what isn't needed, and since you wouldn't care about them being beautiful you wouldn't even need fresh paper and could just use paper that would otherwise go into recycling/trash (letters received, junk mail, etc.)
edit: I did a quick search which both confirmed people have made coin rolls using simple paper, and also that it's highly likely banks will offer pre-made paper holders for the various coin sizes that you can just ask for and get for free (with the bank assuming you'll be bringing them back full of coins - you could either ask for as many as you need, or just one per size and use it as a template for making more from plain paper like this guy does: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AvsOkp_WPxY )
That's a very good point. I wonder about the durability of a paper based solution, but 3d printed rolls might also be suboptimal in that regard. This needs some experimentation.
I'd imagine that if paper alone wasn't strong enough for long term use, using sellotape to cover the entire roll such that the whole thing has a layer of tape on top of the layer of paper would make them pretty durable and add very little time and cost to it. (But I've not done anything like this, so my guessing could be bullshit - happy experimenting!)
I'd honestly just use some ziplock bags and call it a day.
What's a weighted vest? Something for diving?
It's a vest that you can fill with stuff to increase the intensity of a workout.
There was a time in my life when my legs started hurting and shaking from muscle atrophy because I was programming too much and moving too little.
I was looking for a way to fix that issue and I didn't want to waste time going to a gym, so I started talking walks with a weighted vest. Walking is nice because you can think while walking and with a weighted vest you don't have to walk for hours for it to have a useful effect on your body.
FYI going to the gym is hardly a waste of time. You feel refreshed and your body will thank you after a while.
Working out without the commute saves time.
What is a waste of time is going in and out of the gym.
For information, the current research shows that the intensity of the exercise is much less important than the duration. So if you did so little exercise that you get muscle atrophy, a weighted vest isn't going to do much for you.
> For information, the current research shows that the intensity of the exercise is much less important than the duration
For what goal? Increasing strength? I have my doubts.
They're probably referring to some contrived fitness study on hypertrophy.
Anyone who has actually done both low-intensity exercise, e.g. walking, and high-intensity, e.g. heavy compound lifts, will tell you that statement needs a lot of additional caveats.
You’re gonna need to provide a source to that. For caloric burning? Sure, I’d agree. For cardiovascular health? Eh, the answer lies in the middle. For strength and muscle building? No, quite the opposite really. At some point the intensity of an exercise is so low it provides no meaningful muscle stimulus.
haha yeah nah. This needs a lot more additional context and caveats.
If I'm working on increasing my deadlift's 1rm, doesn't matter if I practice deadlifting for 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, but never go above 10% of my current 1rm
It's a way to increase the risk of injury to your knees and ankles and strain your back and shoulders while taking walks, and in general make walking more unpleasant.
Some people think it's an exercise 'life hack'.
If you're injuring yourself by walking around with a few extra kilos then you are so, so hilariously out of shape that any advice you can give is competely disregardable.
I avoided injury when backpacking through the Himalayas by tying helium balloons to by backpack for neutral buoyancy. Had to make slight adjustments as altitude changed, but it all worked out. I had my porter carry the helium tanks.
God must have created America, humans wouldn’t have been capable of trekking with such weight.
I do not know if that is satirical, specially the last sentence?
The OP said their legs were shaking just standing due to lack of exercise. So, they were literally that hilariously out of shape.
The risk of injury while walking in a weighted vest is not much higher than walking normally. A very high weight of vest is probably ill advised, but walking on a very flat/regular surface for long periods is far more damaging than walking with a little extra weight. Weighted bracelets/limb weights are dangerous though, and shouldn't be used unless you know what you're doing and take care not to move too quickly and put excess strain on joints.
How much weight on a weighted arm band is considered dangerous? I'm considering 500 gram bands for my arms, that's just about twice the weight of a cellular phone today.
It depends on what you're doing, but 500g shouldn't be dangerous as long as you wear the weights tightly bound so they don't bounce or slide. What you want to watch out for are anything that overextends or puts pressure on the joints - those movements can cause damage even unweighted and having weights just makes the danger worse.
I'd be worried about blisters/rashes/rubbing if the weights slide around. I use an exercise-bike like device and realised I was getting a blister on my hands from the constant motion of the grip.
Thank you.
Ehh, I've been doing fitness boxing and knockout home fitness (Nintendo switch) with 1.5 kg wrist/hand weights for ages now, no issues to speak off. I think he's taking about the 2-5kg weights, these are way more dangerous then you'd expect from wearing them. (I did that for a while, after getting slightly In shape - at least until I read up on it)
Strong recommendation for Nintendo switch for baseline fitness btw, these games are great for a 1-2 day 20 minutes workout/week for unfit office workers. Way better experience then the equivalent VR games.
What are the equivalent VR games? Just curious.
I don't play too much VR these days, but enjoyed Beat Saber for "stationary movement", Gorn for beating up stuff and the VR ports of the original Serious Sam games for "run and shoot like a maniac".
These can be pretty physically challenging too! my issue with arcade style games for fitness is that they stop whenever you fuck up. That's not really great when your goal is to get moving for ~20 minutes or so.
The one's I've currently got installed on my quest 3 are
Supernatural Fitness (I need a VPN to play because they're geolocking it to USA). I find the way they try to "get personal" with the trainer super awkward.
FitXR (only one with decent passthrough gameplay) I dislike how most exercises are centered around "gyms", whenever you enter a session, there are others around you doing the same exercise as you and you get a scoreboard. It really doesn't vibe with me whatsoever. I also don't believe that I almost always get first or second place - I'm pretty sure this is showing you numbers to make you feel good about yourself.
XR workout It's the most "indie" of these and with the highest difficulty ceiling. It's biggest downfall is that it doesn't really give you a generated "I wanna exercise for 20 minutes" button. At least I couldn't find it.
There are also others, but I don't have them installed. I.e. Les milles etc
But as I said before: purely from a workout perspective, the Nintendo games work way better in my experience.
It's just so awkward in VR compared to Knockout Home Fitness, worse signalling what you need to do next - you're wearing a headset while getting sweaty - no center stage youre watching, instead youre just trying to guess which movement you're supposed to do while things randomly float around.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ctLdgFf5GCQ
Your body weight varies by more than that during the course of a normal day. Carrying 1kg should not increase any sort of risk of injury unless you exceptionally weak (as in, have trouble walking at all).
For the same reason, you probably won't see much benefit from such light weight over just walking a little faster or a little further.
The problem is that when you put weight on your limbs you are creating levers and inertia which get transferred to joints in ways those joints are not good at dealing with.
How to you carry groceries (or, basically, function at all) if you can't handle a 500g weight attached to your arm?
One usually doesn't do much with their arms while carrying groceries, they just hang at the side or move the bag around when putting it down or picking it up. When performing other movements, especially when they are fast or forceful, the extra weight can add momentum that is potentially hazardous, especially if it bounces or moves around (makes it very hard to compensate for reflexively). If present during repetitive tasks, extra weight can increase the risk of repetitive stress injuries occurring.
Some people have no, zero, none understanding of sensible limits. "If X is good then more X must be better" applied to one or more aspects of their life. Hence protein in their diet, vitamin supplements, weight in a vest, and of course, infamously, having a presence on social media.
Is it worse than carrying a backpack?
I went 0' 5' 10' 15, 20kg over 3 years after an embolism. N=1 (rather like yourself: or you spoke to/ read about people that don't quite understand 'pacing'. Do you/ them struggle with 1 bag of shopping? I make three or more light(er)trips.
In the same way that consuming food and drink is? Or carrying a backpack of things you need, not just dead weight?
Maybe I misundertand - how much weight are we talking about here?
Used in running to add extra resistance.
I've used them on and off in the past; useful in limited circumstances.
> you can also "buy" coins "for free"
Free till you count inflation and opportunity cost. (What you could gian as interest with some other investment)
But yeah, probably still cheaper than some product from a store.
> saved up from my childhood
Isn't Euro just from 2002? That surely is not that long time ago!
It's 22 years ago, roughly
Anecdote from the days switching to the Euro with respect to weights: When I was working at a restaurant with high thoughput at the end of the '90s and early '00 we first had a giant coin sorting machine. That thing was innacurate (hello Egyptian coins of same sizes as ours) due to only measuring size and being not that accurate. Bank notes were counted by hand.
After the introduction of the Euro, all coins were counted in standard sized cups which also fit in the cashiers trays so no swapping needed, the error rate reduced to near zero (at counting, difference between amount on bag and what the bank told us was in it). Also, the machine was 500 grams instead of half a small room.
The same was applied to bank notes, as they also have a standard weight due to standerdized size and production method. This reduced the error rate even further as counting is difficult as it turns out if you want to do it at scale. It also made the task way faster. Theoretically the machine could count the notes in one go, but it mostly reported "error check notes" messages if you did that. Things like thick tape (for repair when the bank note was damaged) was enough to throw it off in some cases.
Those were interesting times, with people buying a 25ct item with a 250 note to not go to the bank to exchange old for new currency. (Fyi, you do not have to legally accept that as the due dilligence needed with high notes would outweigh the cost of the item).
Other anecdote: Also a lot of 50 euro fake notes showed up within months after introduction, easilly cought as they lit up like a freshly washed white shirt under UV light.
> bank notes, as they also have a standard weight due to standerdized size and production method.
LOL, I worked for a bank branch located in a low socio-economic area. The pubs and bars would come in on Monday morning with huge wads of bank notes, wet with beer and whiskey, and it all had to be hand-counted as machines couldn't do it. We then had to bundle up excess notes and heat-shrink wrap them. I'm sure there were some pretty interesting bacterial colonies growing in there!
Soviet coins (at least post 1961) were designed explicitly with this application in mind.
1, 2, 3, and 5 kopeck coins weighed their value in grams. They could also be used to estimate lengths; 1 kopeck was 15 mm in diameter and 5 kopeck was 25 mm.
That's a very cool intentionally usefully design. What's the rationale behind a 3-kopeck coin though? I don't think I've seen a '3' denomination in any other currency.
So I never looked into it closely, but I knew that the 3 and 15 kopeck coins had names of their own of Tatar origin, so it had to have had a long history.
According to wikipedia [1,2,3], as a physical coin it was minted periodically throughout Russian history. The Tatar origin of its informal historical name is either 'gold'[4] or 'six'[5].
It was last introduced in 1839-1841 and persisted into Soviet period, until 1991 when it was discontinued by the newly independent Russia. The 1/2/3/5 weight system had to be of the Soviet design, since the metric system was adopted following the Bolshevik revolution, but the weights and dimensions haven't changed since 1926 [6].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruble#Russia's_coins
[2] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D1%80%D0%B8_%D0%BA%D0%B...
[3] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D0%BB%D1%82%D1%8B%D0%BD...
[4] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%82%D1%8B%D0%B...
[5] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%82%D1%8B
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_ruble#Coins,_1924%E2%80...
I think pre-decimal pound sterling coins had a 3p coin, but it makes more sense in that context.
Kopecks are 100th of a ruble. If they were ever a non-decimal value, it predates the early 20th century.
The Australian $1 coin weighs exactly 9g and is 25mm.
I built a computer vision device that used the top-down area of a penny as a calibration standard. Coins are useful, easy-to-get items that have relatively tight manufacturing tolerances.
What about wear ? Were they only new coins ?
Ever since coin clipping got out of hand in the 1700s most coins feature milled edges or edge inscriptions. They make the edges more resistant to wear and make any wear easy to spot.
Of course there's a limit to the precision you can get from coins, but considering the scale of their production and the account of handling they see they are surprisingly good
> in the 1700s
It's been happening since ever.
Our area measurement application did not require that tight a tolerance (we were estimating yield on broken material). If I needed that tight a tolerance, I could have gotten proof coins from the mint, or potentially switched to using a real calibration standard like a gauge block.
I’ve never seen significant ware on a coin in circulation.
Have you?
I have often, though I suspect not enough to make a significant difference to someone who is already OK with the slight variance between un-worn coins.
I've seen enough wear to prevent them to be calibration material at least.
Depends on what your tolerances are. If you only need to be within a mm a coin is going to beat that by an order of magnitude.
We use a pack of cigarettes as a gauge for one of the jobs we do. Quick, (not so) cheap, and readily available. May have to standardize on a vape though in the near future.
Only on counterfeit £1 coins, before the coins were redesigned to make them harder to fake
I have coins that originally had milled edges that are now completely smooth.
Also a penny is .750 exactly. None of the other US coins have a "useful" diameter.
The US nickel is so close to 5 grams that I've seen them used as weights in a laboratory.
At one point, I worked out that US dimes, quarters, and half dollars all weigh $20/lb (iirc), which made the task of counting my accumulated change a lot easier.
That's because that was the price of silver. The mint was for many centuries a way to get your precious metals divided into units of standardized weights that were stamped to certify their authenticity, thus facilitating commerce, though frequently rulers succumbed to the temptation of "debasing" them by diluting the precious metals with so-called "base" (in the sense of "low", "contemptible") metals such as tin, lead, and zinc.
So quarters weren't worth 25¢ because the government said so; they were worth 25¢ because they were made out of 25¢ worth of silver.
That's the same reason "peso" means "weight" and the "shekel" and "pound" take their name from units of weight.
This ended in 01965 in the USA, followed by the end of the gold standard, since which the dollar has lost 96% of its value relative to the precious metals that used to define it. The consensus among economists is that this is a good thing because it prevents deflation. I'm not sure.
Off topic, but may I ask why you use a leading zero when writing the year? (01965 rather than 1965)
You're not the only person I've seen do it on this site, and I can't recall ever seeing it not on this site, so I'm wondering if its because you're in the habit (or wanting to be in the habit) for some technical thing you do like working on a database that needs years in that format, or if there's some reason you feel that its better to write them that way in prose?
It's a Long Now Foundation concept [0]. The idea is to encourage people to think on a more civilizational time scale, and avoid another 'millenium bug' problem in ~7095 years.
0 - https://longnow.org/about/
I am relieved that when archaeologists download HN archives 7095 years from now, they won't be confused about which "1965" we were discussing!
https://xkcd.com/1683/
A somewhat frequently raised question:
<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>
<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>
Ok, and what happens in 97975 years? I guess the Long Now people didn't think that far ahead, did they?
You mean in the year 099999?
Ok so the goal is to just have a leading zero at all times?
0I 0don't 0see 0why 0not.
Really though, it's a nice way to provoke some thought, and maybe even start to balance our rather extreme bias towards the very immediate future.
Ah, thanks for the explanation.
Oh, I assumed it was the zip code for Bretton Woods. Its funny how it works out to just the next state over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system
If you dig into this person’s posting history and also if you read regularly on HN for a couple years you will notice that it is actually this very user that deliberately uses the 0 prefixed 5 digit year numbers, and also goes out of their way to include year numbers into their posts to make people ask this question.
Hmm, I checked the last two pages of their history and this is the only comment with a year, so it can't be that out of their way.
I'm puzzled about what sorts of discussions of historical coinage policies lynguist is used to reading that don't mention specific years.
no one uses 0-based indexes[0] for references elsewhere, either.
0: this
> since which the dollar has lost 96% of its value relative to the precious metals that used to define it.
Why is this important?
It may not be, but, as I said, economists generally believe it to be important. It's a very noticeable departure from the previous 180 or so years, during which time it had lost about 50% of its value by that standard. I'm not saying, for example, that the US currency will inevitably collapse due to a Zimbabwe-style hyperinflationary spiral, although that is a thing that many fiat currencies have done going back to the Song, nor that commodity money such as silver coinage is immune to inflation—coinage debasement is even older than paper-money hyperinflation.
Economists generally believe that the US's gradual shift from commodity money to fiat money over the period 01932–01971 was beneficial.
But I suspect that the shift to a fiat-money basis may be having some effects on the economy that are not well understood.
I was asking why it is important for the currency value to be reflected in the value of a precious metal. My understanding is that precious metals were used historically because of rarity, the ease of working with them to make currency, and the difficulty of counterfeiting. All of those things can be transferred to modern banknotes, so I wonder what the value making the dollar's market price equal to the market price of a specific amount of metal.
Inflation is something that is generally considered good by economists because it allows for growth. If the money supply is fixed at how much of a certain metal you have mined, then the economy cannot expand without the money deflating. Deflation completely stops growth because no one will lend, and people will be reluctant to spend something that gets more valuable over time.
Right, that's precisely the currently fashionable belief system as I understand it. But I'm not entirely comfortable praising the US economic system in the fiat-money era 01971–02024 by comparison to the previous 53 years, 01918–01971, which were the last 53 years of the commodity-money era there, except for a short break in the 01920s. I think everyone agrees that the US economy developed in a qualitatively better way from 01918 to 01971 than from 01971 to today, and that there was a sort of discontinuity around 01971.
It's possible that the mainstream economists are right, and that things would be far worse without the shift to fiat money, and it's just a coincidence that it happened at the same time everything started falling apart. We don't have anything like a controlled experiment. A lot of things happened to the US around 01971: the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the end of the Apollo program, the War on Drugs, the New Age movement, CREEP, rapprochement with the PRC, the energy crisis, the Clean Air Act, second-wave feminism, Love Canal, etc. Most of these seem like things you'd naïvely expect to reduce domestic economic inequality, though, however detrimental they might have been to the residents of Taipei and especially My Lai. So why did it skyrocket instead?
PG has an innocent explanation: as I understand it, he thinks companies suddenly had to compete for superstars in the job market, abandoning seniority-based pay and thus creating the yuppie and growing wealth inequality. But a plausible alternative explanation is that fiat money rewards elites in nonobvious ways, enabling them to concentrate ownership of the economic base in a smaller and smaller subset of the population. Certainly that was the merit Marco Polo claimed for paper money when he became the first European to describe it in writing.
It's not a widely accepted theory today, more associated with crackpots actually, but it certainly isn't new.
> I think everyone agrees that the US economy developed in a qualitatively better way from 01918 to 01971 than from 01971 to today
I don't think everyone agrees on that. There was a huge crash which posed an existential threat to capitalism in the middle of the first one.
> Most of these seem like things you'd naïvely expect to reduce domestic economic inequality, though, however detrimental they might have been to the residents of Taipei and especially My Lai. So why did it skyrocket instead?
What does any of this have to do with currency policy?
> But a plausible alternative explanation is that fiat money rewards elites in nonobvious ways, enabling them to concentrate ownership of the economic base in a smaller and smaller subset of the population.
Even more plausible than 'post-WWII cold war politics and domestic upheaval due to civil rights, the rise of the middle class, birth control and women getting control over their own lives caused society to shift in unexpected ways and gained reactions from all segments of society which shape our modern world'?
> It's not a widely accepted theory today, more associated with crackpots actually, but it certainly isn't new.
Yet you are doing that thing where it is obvious that you believe this but won't say it openly.
I think it's a worthwhile idea to explore, but most worthwhile ideas to explore are still actually wrong. You can't know which until you explore them, which I haven't done in this case.
Probably you would benefit from learning to engage with people capable of seriously considering ideas without embracing them, because it seems like you're looking for some kind of partisan struggle instead.
Anyone interested in exploration might do well to take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor#Proposed_revival
(I'm not going to, because currency arguments existed well before 1971; eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_silver#Climax . But if any of you all find anything, I'm all ears...)
I'd forgotten about the bancor, thanks!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coins_of_the_United_States_dol... confirms that, and shows it works for dollar coins, too (I’m using the weights in grains because that makes the comparison easier; a pound is exactly 7,000 grains)
Dime: 35 gr
Quarter: 87.5 gr
Half-dollar: 175 gr
Dollar: 350 gr
Note that the names for the first three coins are all units of subdivision. "Quarter" and "half" most obviously, dime comes from the Latin decima, meaning "one tenth". The equivalent Roman coin was the denarius.
"Nickel" and "penny" break that pattern, with the first referencing the composition of the coin (originally called a "half-dime"), and penny is a measure of weight, varying by locale. The British penny is 1/240 of a Tower pound (later decimalised to 1/100 in the 1960s), whilst an American pennyweight (used for example in reference to nails) is 1/1000th of a pound.
<https://www.etymonline.com/word/nickel>
<https://www.etymonline.com/word/penny>
Nickel is ~5 grams. Dollar bill is ~1 gram.
I like how easy it is to remember nickel == 5 g.
The "ten US nickles is always 50g" mantra has helped me detect several defective scales (whether intentional or not, I want accuracy).
Maybe this was so obvious the author did not write it down, but you can also use this to measure accurately weight of objects below 10 g.
First you make the stacks for 15.0, 15.5, .. 17.5, 18.0. Preferrably using tiny amounts of superglue.
Then you put one stack on one side of the scales, and the other stack on the other side, and you have accurate weights for 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0.
You can make some of these combinations more efficiently, but the more coins you use in total, the better accuracy you get as manufacturing variations average out (up to a certain point of course).
It is a bit more cumbersome to make a quarter gram, but you can make one stack of {5x 0.01, 2x 0.02, 1x 0.1, 1x 0.2} for a weight of 27.46 g, and one stack of {2x 0.02, 3x 0.05, 1x 0.01, 1x 0.2,} giving 27.72 g, for a difference of 0.26 g.
As others have mentioned, using Lego is a nice way to make high precision scales. Take a 1x16 Lego Technic brick with holes and balance it on a thick needle through the middle hole. Needle support can be built from other bricks. Use thin sewing thread and some bricks to hang some 6x8 plates from each end.
British coin values are also proportional to weight, within the groupings that can be put together in the little coin bags.
2p weighs twice as much as 1p.
10p weighs twice as much as 5p.
50p weighs 2.5x as much as 20p.
£2 weighs twice as much as £1.
I think you've misremembered a couple of them (or coins have changed since you learned those facts).
In this link is a table of the current weight of UK coins, including the ratio between each coin and the coin below it: https://chatgpt.com/share/67151004-3fd0-800c-b534-b5933a7305...
Confirmed with sources like https://thecoinexpert.co.uk/blog/what-do-uk-coins-weigh/ and https://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/coin-design-and-...
2p does weigh double 1p
10p does weigh double 5p
But 50p weighs 1.6x 20p
and £2 weighs 1.37x £1
Huh, you are right. I must have seen the first two pairings (1p/2p and 5p/10p) and extrapolated.
20p is particularly convenient, at exactly 5g.
Same weight as 1 sheet of 80gsm A4 paper!
(A4 sheet area is 1/16 of a square metre)
Neat. Also, all the copper coins (1, 2, and 5 cent) are 1.67 mm thick, so three stacked is half a centimeter to good accuracy.
Water is also a convenient and accurate measure of weight if you know its volume.
I guess it depends on what kind of accuracy you're aiming for. The density/weight of water changes depending on temperature, salinity, pressure, impurities and probably other factors.
So if you're either deep into a volcano or on the top of a cold mountain and need 0.001g precision, you might want to find an alternative way :)
I think the volcano might be useful - we could use the heat to steam distill the water, then on our trip up the mountain we could take a quick stop at sea level to conduct our measurements.
For the USA, an unworn 5 cent nickel weighs 5 grams. When I was testing one of those tiny portable scales that are battery operated, I would use 1, 2, and 3 nickels to determine if it was close to being accurate.
Indeed. Calibrating scales with nickels is a well-known trick in certain circles, including, but not limited to, organic chemistry labs. It won't do for analytic weighing, but for sanity-checking a scale before weighing out reagents, it does the trick.
Ah, good! A few years ago, I picked up a "pocket scale" in a legit head shop. I had intended to weigh out doses of Kratom powder I'd picked up there, too. (The Kratom turned out to be nasty stuff, but the scale works fine, even for weighing postal mail.)
I was considering picking up some accurate weights for calibrating the scale properly, but if nickels will work, I could probably figure out how to procure some nickels instead. Right now, I have a roll of quarters and zero nickels in the house. I was using one to open up my electric candles, but it went missing, so I'm using a dime instead.
That's how I've always calibrated my coffee scales.
Very useful information, I used it around that time period with a lego balance scale to measure weights of various drugs in high school.
Weed dealers would commonly use a 1p coin to weigh an 1/8 oz of hash
Google tells me a 1p coin weighs 0.1257 oz, so nearly exactly 1/8 oz.
I knew someone who got caught by the metropolitan police with a fairly ordinary amount of weed (which probably wouldn't have attracted anything more than a warning), but also with a set of weights. I think he got a suspended sentence in the end. Using coins and something innocuous which could be used as a balance would seem to make sense.
This has always puzzled me. Why would you make a coin that is very nearly, but not quite, 1/8 oz? It's not a nice round metric weight either.
Metric only has an advantage for precision measurements that have to be operated on arbitrarily, not for dividing things. You're usually dividing things in halves, far less often into thirds and even more rarely into fifths. 1/8 oz is an ounce that has been divided in half three times. Or you can think of it as a pound that has been divided in half seven times.
I understand why they might have chosen 1/8 oz. I don't understand why they chose not quite 1/8 oz. That's the puzzle.
Could it be that it is meant to be 1/8th ounce nominally, but there is some lacquer or varnish that takes the weight up slightly?
It's so that big Dave can sell his 8ths a little bit under weight
The 1 JPY coin and (all?) USD bills are 1 gram exactly
Dollar bills are secretly weighted in metric units? Evidence of the Illuminati world government, surely.
The conspiracy is far more vast than you imagine!
Every single customary unit is secretly defined according to the metric system!
Soviet coins were specifically designed with this in mind:
1 kopeck - 1g
2 kopecks - 2g
3 kopecks - 3g
5 kopecks - 5g
(They didn't keep it proportional for 10+ probably because 5g is already a fairly hefty coin.)
Perhaps a helpful addition: I collected my change money over several years (about 9kg in total, mostly lower valued coins, since the higher values can be spent easily).
After exchanging them on a bank into useful money: the average Euro coin weights about 3.6 grams and has an average value of 7 cents. :-)
Euro coins circulating in various countries of the Eurozone have different obverses – I wonder whether that affects weight?
Probably not significantly. It would make it too hard to build machines that accept all euro coin variants, yet reject cheaper non-euro coins of similar proportions.
I was thinking similar, but then it occurred to me that they may be debossed, rather than engraved, so no change to material? Not a coin expert :D
Any additive/subtractive method at that scale for coin faces sounds like a huge waste of time and effort compared to just pressing the design, but also not a coin expert.
Striking/pressing with a shaped die is the traditional process, not least because the material itself used to be the store of value rather than the provenance of the mint— The coin shape was really there to certify how much gold/silver it contained and that the government had been paid whatever tax (seignorage) was owed on the ore.
Now that we’ve lived in a fiat-currency world for decades, it’s possible that new processes are being used as the concerns are different— anti-counterfeiting measures are more important than anti-shaving ones now, for instance.
Yes, they stamp/press it and the deformation of that process is also used to fit the inner to the outer part on the 1 and 2 Euro coins.
See this German children's program: https://youtu.be/nBuSmbcp1AE (seems to only have German subtitles, but they are quite visual)
The weight is set by law at least to the 10th of a gram. Couldn't find an explicitly set margin of error though
Using coins as precision weights was used in Jules Verne's Off on a Comet, published in 1877
Soviet copper kopecks coins (1, 2, 3, 5) weighed their exact nominal value in grams
IIRC the USSR coins weighted their value in grams, so that the cashier can know their value just by weighting them on the scales.
I think it's worth noting the currency term 'peso' for the money used in a lot of former spanish colonies, directly translated, means 'weight'. For example there's a famous mexican singer of recent who goes by 'peso pluma' and it means featherweight, like the boxing classification, not as much to do with money
It could very well be a pun to do with how he gets money, though. Wiki says he makes narco music, and bird references are common to drug slang in both US English and (Mexican) Spanish.
Juegos de palabras for sure
>The smallest possible combinations summing to n * 0.5 g are:
It left out 7.5g (it mentioned it above though). I guess if the definition of "combination" requires at least 2 coins then 7.5g doesn't count.
Would be great to see this table extended also for the case when you put coins on the other side of the balance, i.e. subtracting the coins' weights
I was thinking, since the post mentions not being able to get exactly 10g. But you can get 15g/25g exactly, so you're at 10g net by putting them on either side of the scale.
Big Ben uses a stack of pennies to keep it accurate
The US Nickle (5 Cents) ways 5 grams. I personally think that wad done on purpose as a tentative step to move to the metric system.
The US uses the metric system, just with very non-standard units. All of the fundamental customary units are defined precisely in SI terms.
The precise five gram weight of the nickel was deliberate, but dates to the Civil War, a time when the US had no intention at all of moving to the metric system. It's rumored that a gram or two of weight was added to the coin on the premise that "five cents five grams" was a nice round number, but actually due to lobbying by moneyed interests who owned a nickel mine, so they could sell more nickel to the government.
> The US uses the metric system, just with very non-standard units. All of the fundamental customary units are defined precisely in SI terms.
"Uses the metric system" = uses standard metric units.
By the logic you lay out, the metric system itself doesn't use the metric system, seeing as the units are not defined by reference to SI terms but to natural constants. (And if your definition of the metric system includes both US customary units and natural constants, then your use of the phrase 'metric system' has ceased to signify anything meaningful.)
> the metric system itself doesn't use the metric system
Of course the metric system doesn't use the metric system. How would that even work?
SI units are, as you point out, defined in terms of measured aspects of reality.
US customary units, on the other hand, are defined in terms of the metric system.
And yes, this means that both of them are grounded in measured aspects of reality. Again. How else could this possibly work? Measuring themselves, perhaps?
If US customary units were defined directly in terms of measurements, then they wouldn't use the metric system. They would only be interconvertible through those measurements, and if they weren't the same measurements, as they easily could not be, this would be an empirical process subject to further experiment and refinement.
But they're not. They're defined in terms of SI, making conversion a matter of arithmetic.
It's a load-bearing statement. I do understand how someone who lacks grounding in the physical sciences might not realize that. Glad to help.
> It's a load-bearing statement. I do understand how someone who lacks grounding in the physical sciences might not realize that. Glad to help.
Condescending and wrong, and all in defence of the facially farcical statement that the US uses the metric system. Not that US customary units are defined in terms of metric quantities, which is the moved goalpost you're now trying to defend, but that "the US uses the metric system".
Whether or not the US 'uses the metric system' is not contingent on what units US customary units are legally defined in reference to, that's merely trivia.* US customary units do not form part of the metric system, and metric units do not enjoy widespread use in the United States (with minor exceptions).
Ergo, the US does not use the metric system.
* And relatively recent trivia at that, US units were naturally not first defined in metric units, only later restated as such.
Two British 1/2pences weighed exactly £8's worth of....
Whilst exploring what money is, I had the realisation that almost all units of currency are either measures of weight (pound, livre, peso, shekel, penny), divisions of same (denarius, quarter), of quality or its representation (real, crown, dollar, florin. zloty, yen, yuan), or are descriptive of the state in which they're used (bolivar, afgani, euro), though that last is arguably a form of the second.
That is, traditional specie coin currency is standardised for quantity and quality, or at least is initially. Most states have found a need to devalue specie coin, and virtually any state with a sufficiently advanced financial system and institutional trust either settles on a fiat currency or adopts another country's fiat currency as its own standard. kragen is making a similar point here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41895405>.
For the latter, see the U.S. dollar which is either the or an officially accepted currency: Turks and Caicos and British Virgin Islands (both British overseas territories); Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba (all Dutch municipalities); the independent states of Ecuador, El Salvador, Timor-Leste, Federated States of Micronesia, Republic of Palau, and the Marshall Islands; and quasi-official or widespread use in the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Costa Rica, Panama, Bermuda, Myanmar, Cambodia, Cayman Islands, Honduras, Nicaragua, Somalia, and Zimbabwe.
I've developed the view that seignorage, that is, the exchange value in excess of specie value of coinage, is effectively a measure of trust in a currency system, and that fiat currency in paper or even more so as ledger entries (written or electronic) express an extraordinary level of trust in a currency, the more so if that currency is widely accepted internationally.
Another interpretation is that money in a given economic region is the most widely accepted commodity, that is to say, the exchange medium which is accepted preferentially to any other. This need not be a conventional currency (e.g., commodity or symbolic exchange of shells, hides, cattle, cigarettes, alcohol, laundry detergent, etc.), or the official currency of a region (though legal sanction and sanction of discharge of debt go a long way to establishing a currency within a given region). Multiple currencies may trade simultaneously, possibly in slightly differing contexts, and through much of history there has been at least some distinction between retail trade (often copper), wholesale (silver), and capital / government financing (gold). Adam Smith discusses this at great length in Wealth of Nations. Multi-metallic systems often involve variable exchange rates between different classes of money, and I've mused that this might be something worth reintroducing to modern financial systems.
> Multi-metallic systems often involve variable exchange rates between different classes of money, and I've mused that this might be something worth reintroducing to modern financial systems. How and why? Even as arbitrage is easier to effect as ever? The point of the bimetallic system was that gold wasn't available in high enough quantities for the needs of the economy (monetary mass) and was too valuable for small-denomination coinage. Those aren't problems we currently have…
How and why?
One of the biggest problems with contemporary monetary theory is that issues at the retail level (wages and household spending) are difficult to address without creating inflationary asset spirals, including most notably of real estate, but also of stocks, other financial assets, and collectables (wines, art masterworks, memorabilia, etc.). One can in fact look to markets and auctions for such assets as one of several signs that monetary policy is in fact misfiring, in my opinion.
Matt Ridley isn't someone whose views I generally subscribe to, but in a Feb 2019 Intelligence Squared (UK) debate with Johan Norberg and David Runciman, Ridley made a throwaway comment that whilst "[m]arkets in goods and services for immediate consumption such as 'haircuts and hamburgers'work very well and efficiently in delivering innovation and efficiency ... markets in assets (goods for hoarding and resale) are 'so automatically prone to bubbles and crashes that it is hard to design them so they work at all'".
This apparently appears in his book The Rational Optimist, I'm finding via a FastGPT query:
<https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7776209-the-rational-opt...>
<https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/10684114-the-rational-...>
I strongly suspect Ridley was citing his own work in that debate, so thanks for prompting me to look that up.
There are various ways in which such iniquities might be addressed. Among the traditional approaches are various income supports, minimum wage, universal basic or guaranteed minimum incomes (UBI/GMI), on the wage side, a land value tax (tax on the unimproved value of land), an asset or wealth tax, and/or a transaction tax (particularly aimed at HFT).
Another possibility though suggests itself in my comment above about status as legal tender. That is, different currencies might be recognised as legal tender (discharging debt) only for a specific set of transactions. Normally we shy from this on efficiency grounds, but it seems to me that there might be a role that could be played especially in separating financial transactions markets from those in quotidian consumption. There are some early variants of this, largely in the form of expiring financial assistance, e.g., a debit card whose balance expires after a given time (1--5 years or so. In the US I believe SNAP benefits (grocery assistance) works this way, and I've heard of similar projects elsewhere. A health savings account in the US (a tax-deferred put-away plan for healthcare expenses not otherwise covered by insurance) is a similar mechanism.
And keep in mind: we're not limited to specific classes of specie (e.g., copper, silver, gold, iron, etc.), but could create and retire entire sets of currencies at will, though I'd suggest at the very least starting with a limited set, and targeting general areas of financial activity, again, wage/retail, wholesale, fiance, government spending (possibly at multiple levels), and international exchange being more obvious candidates.
Related concepts are of insurance or financing of specific assets or transactions. We're in the midst of finding out what uninsurability will mean for real estate markets in disaster-prone areas (wildfires in the US West, hurricanes along the US Gulf Coast and Southestern Seaboard). Paul Baran, co-inventor of packet-switched networks mentioned insurance redlining and its effects on inner-city homeowners and small businesses in a 1968 monograph, "On the Future Computer Era: Modification of the American Character and the Role of the Engineer, or, A Little Caution in the Haste to Number":
<https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P3780.html>
<https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2008/P3780...> (PDF) (p. 6)
James Burke discussed a similar situation (reluctance of funding syndicates to underwrite fancy "new unprooved" technology) in severely retarding adoption of lateen-rigged sailing ships, in the TV series / book Connections. (These had been used for about a thousand years by Arabic and Indian sailors, but weren't adopted in Europe until the 1500s or so.) For specific types of transactions, mandating payment in the appropriate monetary type in order to qualify for insurance or certification might work.
The net effect would still be porous, but even porous systems can be managed so long as they impose sufficient frictions. And yes there might be exchanges between currency systems, but so long as those are also somewhat managed (e.g., with reporting, taxes/fees, etc.) this need not be a free-for-all.
And in the meantime, it would be possible for central banks to inject money into specific sectors of the economy, at least distinguishing between, say, wage/retail, wholesale, and finance, and quite possibly even more finely.
Yep. 1 SEK coin is 7 grams to the dot ;-)
Or you can buy from China a scale with 0.01g precision for next to nothing.
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