Yeah, I'm not surprised. I'd imagine an experience like being kidnapped would really change someone. Glad the little fella's made it back to his family.
I'm unconvinced that Israel would completely collapse without support.
And to be clear, the scenario I'm talking about is one where the world steps in and forces Israel to respect Palestinian sovereignty first.
If Russia were to back out of Ukraine and relinquish all captured land to them, and the world was actively keeping them in check, but Ukraine started firing missiles at Moscow anyway, yes, I would say they are wrong to do so.
Also, (sorry for the second post), but did you actually read your sources? Cause I just did and they actually say that the number of needless sequels has either stayed the same or gone down since the 80s.
They are performing far better than they used to, but there are actually less of them now than ever.
Sure, but he said "weren't a thing," not, "were less common."
Like, yes, there have definitely been a rise in needless sequels, but it's not like 1995 (year chosen at random and googled) didn't have a sequel to "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" as one of the top 5 movies of that year.
And if ever there was a franchise in which sequels were needless, lol.
I do feel like the H1-B visa system is completely broken though. You're telling me you "can't find" a cloud engineer in the US, so you just have to import one from India or wherever? It's all just fraud to let companies undercut the American labor market.
Interesting. Makes sense.I'm sure some re-enter from, like, coinstar machines or something, but that's gotta be a tiny minority.
But that seems like another point in favor of discontinuing them. If people who get them literally never use them, seems like a pointless coin, lol.
But it seems like they'll probably self eliminate one way or the other over time. I guess the concern would be that they'd self eliminate too quickly, as no one who gets them ever spends them, so basically every distributed penny just instantly vanishes.
But I think the problems with cutting over will largely just be minor heartache. Like, it'll be minorly bumpy for a month or two, but by a year out everyone will have figured it out and no one will miss them.
Yeah, like, the government has longstanding rules for how to handle in circulation currency, to include removing old and battered bills and coins from circulation over time. I kinda just assume the plan is to do exactly what you would normally do without making any new ones.
People overstate that problem. They say "businesses" as if all businesses are the same.
Bank of America has 3600 branches in the US. At $20/day, that's $72k/day, or $26mil a year.
Bank of America has $3.5 trillion dollars in assets. If they're making 1% interest on that (they're making far more than that, I promise), they're making $35 billion dollars a year. So that $26mil makes up less than a tenth of a percent of their total revenue.
Compare that to the Walmart example. First, at Walmart people aren't just buying one thing. If my cart has 50 items in it, that's a few cents per item. So we're really talking fifty cents to a dollar per transaction. Second, Walmart has around 40 million customers per day. (About half of the total number of people who even have a Bank of America account, and we know that not even half of account holders are going to a brick and mortar every day.)
So, a savings of 1¢ per item is a difference of, conservatively (assuming an average cart size of 10 items), $4mil per day, or around $1.5 billion per year. Contrast with the around $26 million from Bank of America.
They just aren't comparable examples. At its core, the scale issue that you're outlining only matters if you're getting it on a huge number of relevant things it applies to. There just aren't that many actual cash transactions handled by BoA compared to its overall income numbers. Walmart has a huge number of individual items it sells vs it's overall income.
Fair. We'll have to see how it plays out. My gut is that the demand probably won't be there, but we'll just have to see.
But to be clear, we're talking about a brick and mortar bank losing between $10-40 a day. Compared to the overall quantity of money moving through it, that feels like it should be negligible. That's, like, one to two tellers leaving an hour early.
But yeah, the way this should be done is through an act of Congress. Agreed on that. This should really be an easy piece of bipartisan legislation, and the fact that Congress is so broken as to be unable to pass it is a huge indictment in its own right.
I hear what you're saying, but I don't know that I foresee this as more than a niche issue.
Obviously this is just a gut feeling backed by no data, so it's worth the paper it's printed on. But how many pennies were banks giving to non-business customers? I have to believe that it was super negligible.
The vast majority of pennies were issued to businesses to make change. If businesses stop giving out pennies, how many pennies will the banks be asked to hand out?
Time will tell for sure, but my gut is that the amount of people hoarding pennies will be wildly offset by businesses getting rid of them.
And, in your "what if I asked for only 4¢ from the bank" example. The easy solution is that they just give you a nickel and write the penny off as a loss. The penny is just so low value that it wouldn't add up to an appreciable loss. Again, that's gut, but the average bank brick-and-mortar does on the order of hundreds or thousands of transactions per day. If they lost 4¢/transaction, that's only on the order of tens of dollars per day. They lose more to that in miscounts I would imagine.
A fair point. A better, more modern example is probably the two dollar bill. They'll just slowly be pulled out of circulation until they're no longer common.
I'm sure businesses will continue to accept pennies. They'll just start rounding to 5¢ regardless because they're uncommon, and if someone brings in 5 pennies, they'll take them, but eventually the federal reserve will have sucked all but a handful out of circulation.
Probably the same way they handled the halfpenny being removed from circulation. There was no government fiat about it then.
But, luckily, they've got 20yrs minimum to figure it out. They've just stopped making new pennies. Coins are intended to last 20-30 years. It's not like they're going out and stealing everyone's pennies today.
I doubt it's a terribly difficult problem for them to solve over the next two to three decades.
I feel like "X should be for the X-people" is maybe not the best phrasing, considering how that tends to play out throughout history.