About those pennies... (updated) (again)

Pennies are in the news today because Donald Trump has ordered that their production be terminated immediately.  That's fine, and is something I have advocated back in 2011 and predicted would happen "soon" back in 2012, when Canada eliminated their pennies.

Just to clarify the details regarding the cost and savings:

"Mint operations are funded through the Mint Public Enterprise Fund (PEF), 31 U.S.C. § 5136. The Mint generates revenue through the sale of circulating coins to the Federal Reserve Banks (FRB), numismatic products to the public, and bullion coins to authorized purchasers. All circulating and numismatic operating expenses, along with capital investments incurred for the Mint’s operations and programs, are paid out of the PEF. By law, all funds in the PEF are available without fiscal year limitation. Revenues determined to be in excess of the amount required by the PEF are transferred to the United States Treasury General Fund."

The mint makes money (both literally and figuratively).  Any current losses from producing pennies are overshadowed by profits from paper dollars, commemorative coins, proof sets, etc.

The embedded image is of a penny on the planet Mars.

Reposted to add some new information from Bloomberg:

Portland Mint, sells old pennies in bulk — 40,000 pounds (18,100 kilograms) at a time — to investors angling to profit on the copper that makes up 95% of the coins minted before 1983. A cache of one-cent pieces from Portland Mint with a face value of roughly $60,000 sells for about $120,000.

The wager is that those older pennies contain copper that would be worth about $180,000 at current prices. One snag: It’s illegal to melt a mass of Lincoln cents to harvest the metal. But penny hoarders gained fresh hope that their bets will one day pay off when President Donald Trump said this week that he ordered the Treasury secretary to stop minting the coins...

“Collectors and investors speculate the value of copper will go up,” said Ted Ancher, director of numismatics at Apmex, a precious metals dealer in Oklahoma City that has been selling copper pennies for years. “That is the primary reason they buy copper cents.”

Customers favor “the ’82 and earlier stuff,” said Dennis Steinmetz, founder of Steinmetz Coins & Currency in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The company offers 5,000 pennies – with a $50 face value – for $79.

“As you may know you may not currently melt these,” Steinmetz’s website says. “However if the government authorizes melting you will be way ahead.”

Reposted from earlier this year to add some excerpts from a sometimes-humorous article in The Atlantic:

What is the United States going to do with all the pennies—all the pennies in take-a-penny-leave-a-penny trays, and cash registers, and couch cushions, and the coin purses of children, and Big Gulp cups full of pennies; all the pennies that are just lying around wherever—following the abrupt announcement that the country is no longer in the penny game and will stop minting them, effective immediately?

The answer appears to be nothing at all. There is no plan...

It is my miserable fate to possess more miscellaneous information about U.S. one-cent coins than, possibly, any other person on this planet. This is not a boast. The information I command is data no one without a neurodevelopmental disorder would ever yearn to know; it is a body of knowledge with no practical use for anyone. I contracted this condition last year, as I spent several months attempting to ascertain why, in the year 2024, one out of every two coins minted in the United States was a one-cent piece, even though virtually no one-cent pieces were ever spent in the nationwide conduction of commerce, and, on top of that, each cost more than three cents apiece to manufacture...

Another thing I learned daily over the course of my reporting: No one cares about pennies... There were logical reasons not to care: 300 billion pennies—all of them still and indefinitely legal currency—constitute approximately zero percent of the total money supply of the United States (0.0 percent if rounding to one decimal place). The millions of dollars the government loses by paying more than three cents to manufacture one-cent coins represents an infinitesimal fraction of 1 percent of the government’s several-trillion-dollar budget...

Most pennies produced by the U.S. Mint are given out as change but never spent; this creates an incessant demand for new pennies to replace them, so that cash transactions that necessitate pennies (i.e., any concluding with a sum whose final digit is 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 or 9) can be settled. Because these replacement pennies will themselves not be spent, they will need to be replaced with new pennies that will also not be spent, and so will have to be replaced with new pennies that will not be spent, which will have to be replaced by new pennies (that will not be spent, and so will have to be replaced). In other words, we keep minting pennies because no one uses the pennies we mint.

Effectively, they are trash—trash that Americans pay the government (via taxes) to manufacture, at a loss, and then foist back on us..

Then I realized they weren’t going to do anything about the vaults, because there was no plan at all to do anything except stop making pennies... This isn’t how it usually works when a smoothly running country elects to retire some portion of its currency... To date, the Canadian Mint has recycled more than 15,000 tons of pennies, redeemed by the public for their face value. Recycling the metal from Canadian pennies (mainly copper and steel) helped offset the cost of trucking billions of unwanted pennies across the nation. And, of course, it kept the coins out of landfills...

But it’s unclear if anyone would bother recycling U.S. pennies, which, although copper-plated, are made mostly of zinc. Recycled zinc is worth only about a quarter of recycled copper; nearly 1 million tons of copper are recycled in the U.S. each year, versus only about 165,000 tons of zinc. On top of this, a Canadian Mint official told me, copper and zinc are “very hard” to separate.

Personally I hadn't realized the impracticality or impossibility of recycling a copper/zinc mixture.  But the older copper pennies will still have "melt value" (assuming it's now legal to melt them).

When a penny was "... thirty nine ninetieths of a Dollar"

The full phrase, as I encountered it* read as follows:

He sent in his expense account: "for himself & Servant, totaling one hundred and ten dollars and thirty nine ninetieths of a Dollar."

The expense account was by a Lieutenant Armstrong, who led an exploration westward to the Mississippi in 1790.

But why "ninetieths" of a dollar?  I thought I knew early American coinage reasonably well, but I had never encountered this type of accounting.  I reached for an old copy of Yeoman's Red Book to review the early pennies and large cents and could find nothing relevant, nor was there anything in the continental currency section about cents or pence being 90 to the dollar.

So, back to the web, which promptly yielded the images above, which are of course not coins, but rather -

...small change bills of credit payable in specie issued by the Bank of North America in Philadelphia. This was one of several fractional currencies printed to carry on commerce during the "Copper panic" when the price of copper dropped dramatically and copper half penny coins were either not accepted by merchants or only accepted at far below their denominated value. The notes were printed by Benjamin Bache in Philadelphia on paper supplied by Benjamin Franklin that had a marbled border along the top of the sheet.

But why a 90:1 ratio rather than 100 pennies to the dollar?  I found part of the answer at the West Jersey History Project:

Mr. Adams, in his report on the subject of weights and measures, made in 1820, remarks: "It is now nearly thirty years since our new moneys of account, our coins and our mint, have been established. The dollar, under its new stamp, has preserved it name and circulation. The cent has become tolerably familiarized to the tongue, wherever it has been made, by circulation, familiar to the hand. But ask a tradesman or shopkeeper in any of our cities what is a dime, or a mill, and the chances are four in five that he will not understand your question. But go to New York and offer in payment the Spanish coin, the unit of the Spanish piece of eight, and the shop or market man will take it for a shilling. Carry it to Boston or Richmond, and you shall be told that it is not a shilling but a ninepence. Bring it to Philadelphia, Baltimore, or the city of Washington, and you shall find it recognized for an eleven penny bit, and if you ask how that can be, you shall learn that the dollar being of ninety pence, the eighth part of it is nearer to eleven than any other number; and pursuing still further the arithmetic of popular denominations, you will find that half of eleven is five, or at least, that half of the eleven penny bit is the fipenny bit, which fipenny bit at Richmond, shrinks to four pence half penny, and at New York swells to six pence." 

Here is the topic mentioned in The Bankers Magazine, via Google Books during a discussion of the history of the word "dollar":

So, at the time Lieutenant Armstrong submitted his expense account to the government, "the dollar in Pennsylvania equalled seven shillings and sixpence, and the penny was the one-ninetieth of a dollar."

For those who want to pursue this more fully, I think the best discussion I found this morning is in this pdf file entitled State "Currencies" and the Transition to the U.S. Dollar", but it's over 50 pages long and football games are starting shortly, so all I can offer is this screencap:

What a mess it must have been for the early colonists and Americans to cope with currencies and money. 

* in Undaunted Courage; Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West, by Stephen Ambrose (an excellent book, btw, of which I've only read a couple chapters and on which I'll have more to say later.)

Reposted from 2012

Sorting pennies in the dark

I am recurrently amazed at the wonderful logic and math puzzles posted at Futility Closet.   

"You’re in a pitch-dark room. On a table before you are 12 pennies. You know that 5 are heads up and 7 are tails up, but you don’t know which are which. By moving and flipping the coins you must produce two piles with an equal number of heads in each pile. How can you do this without seeing the coins?"

I was not able to solve this on my own and had to peek at the answer.  Even after seeing the answer, it took me a long time to comprehend why it works.

Reposted from 2010 because I found it while looking for something else and still couldn't solve it on my own.

Arm of man who fell off a bicycle

Note that not only are the radius and ulna broken, but the metal plates inside the bones (from repair of previous fractures) are bent at a 90 degree angle.  The victim explains:

Was on a nice leisurely bike ride - shoe laces got stuck on my bike pedal and wrapped around multiple times over. Fell off as I was braking to get them unstuck. I never want to get on a bike again 😫

Embedded image cropped for size and emphasis from the original at Reddit, via Neatorama, where the appropriate advice is offered: "Always double tie your shoes before riding a bike, and tuck the ends into the shoe."

United Airlines claims a "window seat" does not necessarily need to have a window

"In August, United and Delta Air Lines were sued by passengers in two separate but similar suits. Both airlines were accused of unfairly charging extra for some window seats without warning that there wasn't actually a window there.

United filed a motion to dismiss the case on Monday.

"The use of the word 'window' in reference to a particular seat cannot reasonably be interpreted as a promise that the seat will have an exterior window view," the airline's lawyers wrote.

"Rather, the word 'window' identifies the position of the seat—i.e., next to the wall of the main body of the aircraft," they added.

I'll defer any commentary on this absurdity.

Introducing Torx screws

I may be introducing the subject only to myself if this item is well-known.  I encountered it in a reasonably concise Wirecutter article:

"Pros swear by Torx-head screws, an all-around better alternative to the formerly ubiquitous but flawed, finicky Phillips head... The cross-headed design of the Phillips screw is notoriously slippery and easy to damage. That’s why most of the rest of the world moved on from Phillips screws years ago, if they even adopted this miserable standard in the first place.

This isn’t a problem with Torx because the star-shaped head provides much better grip and stability... And all that extra contact between the screw and the drill bit makes it much less likely that you’ll strip the head (or ruin your bit) even if you’re blasting your tools at full speed... [the embed shows a Torx compared to a Phillips with a stripped center]

... there aren’t many credible technical or legal excuses to keep using Phillips screws. The patents on Torx (and other Phillips-beating standards, including square drive) expired decades ago, so anyone can manufacture the bits and screws...

An impact driver looks like a stubby drill, but it sinks screws into wood and other materials at breathtaking speed. (Even basic power tool starter packs usually come with one now.) That tool’s efficiency is often wasted on wobbly, damage-prone Phillips screws, so it makes sense to pair an impact driver’s extra power with a snugger standard like Torx.

For those interested in greater detail, the Wikipedia entry has information on the Torx' history, physics, and subtypes.

Excellent advice not to "future-trip"

There is a very interesting article in the September issue of The Atlantic.  "My Father, Guitar Guru to the Rock Gods" is written by the daughter of Fred Walecki, who crafted instruments and provided advice to the greatest musicians of 1960s California.  Here are the introductory paragraphs:

In August 2000, when I was 2 years old, my mother put me in a maroon velvet dress and stuck foam earplugs in my ears. She carried me through the backstage corridors of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium... My mother remembers the night in flashes. David Crosby—walrus mustache, smiling eyes—telling jokes. Bonnie Raitt’s aura of red hair. In the distance, the sound of Linda Ronstadt warming up. Sitting in a dressing room with Michael McKean and Christopher Guest, already in costume as Spinal Tap’s front men.

That night, the auditorium was hosting the Friends of Fred Walecki benefit concert. These friends included Crosby, Raitt, and Ronstadt. Also Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Emmylou Harris, and Warren Zevon. Three of the four original Eagles, who in this room in 1973 had performed their new album, Desperado, were there too.

One of the Eagles, Bernie Leadon, had helped put the event together. He had known Fred Walecki, my father, since they were teenagers, when Leadon started coming into Westwood Music, Dad’s musical-instrument shop in Los Angeles....

I'm not posting this for the music of the 1960s, which I love (please go to the link to continue reading, if you share that interest).  I'm posting this to share one bit of advice that Fred Walecki offered his grown-up daughter:

"When I was 18, I got a bad concussion that took me out of college for my first semester. My doctor didn’t want me to fly home for a while, so I called Dad one night from the other side of the country, panicked that my brain would never return to normal. 

“What are you looking at right now?” he asked. Pine trees, I said. Some shrubs. I’m sitting on a bench outside. “What’s the temperature like where you are?” It’s nice. Cool but not cold. It was early fall in the Northeast, a new sensation for a Californian. “What does the air smell like?” Wood chips. 

“I know it’s hard, but your only job right now is to stay in this moment and not future-trip. In this moment right now, the one God is giving you, the air smells nice, the temperature is good, you’re somewhere beautiful.”"

Excellent advice, in my opinion, and worth sharing via the blog.

Word for the day: lagniappe

“We picked up one excellent word – a word worth traveling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word – ‘Lagniappe.’ They pronounce it lanny-yap. […] When a child or a servant buys something in a shop – or even the mayor or governor, for aught I know – he finishes the operation by saying, – ‘Give me something for lagniappe.’ The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of liquorice-root; […]”: Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883)

I recently sent an incidental small gift to a friend in New Orleans.  He replied with thanks for the "lagniappe," so of course I had to look that up.  Here are the essentials, courtesy of Wiktionary:

Definition: (chiefly Louisiana, Mississippi, Trinidad and Tobago) An extra or unexpected gift or benefit, such as that given to customers when they purchase something. 

Synonyms: (chiefly Southern US) brotus, (South Africa) pasella, (Ireland) tilly

Etymology: From Cajun French lagniappe, from Spanish la ñapa, a variant of yapa (“small gift or additional quantity given to a valued customer”), from Quechua yapa (“addition, increase, supplement; lagniappe”), yapay (“to add, to increase”).

I thought that might be my first English word of Quechua origin, but a quick check reveals there are many more, including ayahuasca, cocaine, guano, jerk/jerky, pampas, pique, poncho, puma, quinine, quinoa, vicuna, and the place names Andes, Chile, Cuzco, Machu Picchu, and Peru.

A video review of the butterflies of Wisconsin

Wisconsin Butterflies is the definitive online resource for reporting sightings across the state.

Last year's video is here.

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

 

Those interested can read more about the event and the song.  Reposted again from 2015 to add illustrations of some of the ways ships sink in the Great Lakes -

Three more examples are illustrated here.

Reposted for the third time to add this video recording of a similar ship (a Ukranian freighter) actually splitting in the Black Sea:

The relevant action occurs in the first minute; there is a second segment showing the ship sinking.

Addendum:  PBS Wisconsin has a video presentation of a public lecture on The Storm that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald.

And reposted for the final time because today marks the 50th anniversary of the sinking.  Somewhere I hae seen a discussion of the phrase "The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead" being scientifically true because at depth the water is too cold for bacteria to generate decomposition gases to lift the corpse and/or because the hydrostatic pressure at depth prevents the bubble formation.

And I'll add a link to the lyrics, because they are hard to discern in the embedded video.

Holes in the pillars of this bridge

I saw this image in the WhatIsIt subreddit, where readers were asked to provide an explanation for their intended function.   I thought perhaps they were for stringing communication etc cables across the river  and was delighted to read this postulated explanation, which rendered the image blogworthy:

"To plant explosives. In some countries bridges are designed to be easily blown up in case of war. Don't know if this is the case."

It wasn't long before the true explanation was provided, which I'll put "below the fold" so you can ponder for a moment...

Brazilian sand dunes

"In a land still soaked from the rainy season, a river stained with tannin from a nearby forest marbles the sand."

From a set of ten photos at National Geographic, via La Muse Verte.  I have previously written a post about the remarkable Lençóis Maranhenses National Park.

Reposted from ten years ago to add this recent photo of flooded sand dunes at this location, via.

Reposted from 2021 to add this rather nice PBS video on the subject:

Wasp nests for home decor

Here's one way I'm well ahead of the curve on fashion and design.  I've been bringing wasp nests and other natural curiosities into my apartments and home all of my adult life.   The New York Times reports that items like the above now retail for "up to $250 per specimen."  Several photos at the link.

I don't believe inflation is "under control" in the U.S.

All of the recently published charts, and most of the headlines, indicate that monetary inflation is "not a problem" at time in the United States.  Based on personal experience and our family finances and my doomscrolling of the internet, I flat out don't believe those data.

There is some justification to being skeptical, because the federal entities that monitor and report such data have been subject to the government shutdown.  This opinion from a NYT article:

The United States is a month into a government shutdown that has hobbled the nation’s statistical agencies and created the longest economic data blackout in history. The normally steady flow of government data on hiring, spending, wages, prices and other areas has slowed to a trickle, leaving economists to try to fill in the gaps using anecdotes and a mélange of incomplete and often contradictory indicators from private sources.

There is no good time to go without reliable data. But this might be a uniquely bad one. Job growth slowed sharply over the summer, leading to fears that the labor market could be taking a rapid turn for the worse. Such a development would most likely draw a swift response from officials at the Federal Reserve, who are responsible for maximizing employment while keeping inflation stable. But policymakers have no reliable way of knowing whether those trends continued into the fall, or perhaps reversed.

Tara Sinclair, an economist at George Washington University, likened the situation to driving down a road in a heavy fog... But the fog will get thicker from here. The statistical agency was able to release the September inflation report because the underlying data had been collected before the government shut down on Oct. 1. But it hasn’t collected any new data since then. The White House said last week that the government might not be able to release an October inflation report at all. Reports on the job market, consumer spending, manufacturing and other topics are also in jeopardy.

I can see no rational justification for the equity markets to be consistently hitting new all-time highs, largely based on expectations that artificial intelligence is going to supercharge the profitability of major corporations (NYSE chart; NASDAQ not dissimilar).

Full disclosure: I tend to be a "perma-bear" skeptical of rosy scenarios.  I have moved the majority of my savings out of equities into CDs etc, but that in part also reflects my advanced age.  YMMV.

James Garfield - president for only 200 days

I have a new favorite president. Before reading this book, literally the only things I knew about James Garfield were that he was featured on the 20c prexie stamp (because he was the 20th president) and that he was assassinated while in office. Now I can add the following...

He grew up in Ohio in abject poverty – a one-room log cabin with a plank floor and windowpanes made of oiled paper. When he was two years old, his father died at age 33, leaving his mother with four children to feed. She farmed the land with the aid of his 11-year-old brother and saved money so that by age four James was able to get a pair of shoes. At age sixteen he began working on the Erie and Ohio Canal, but returned home after contracting malaria. By then his mother had saved $17, which was used to send him to Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, a one-building prep school. During his first year he worked as a janitor in exchange for receiving an education.

So vigorously did Garfield apply himself during his first year at the Eclectic that, by his second year, the school had promoted him from janitor to assistant professor. Along with the subjects he was taking as a student, he was given a full roster of classes to teach, including literature, mathematics, and ancient languages. He taught six classes, which were so popular that he was asked to add two more – one on penmanship and the other on Virgil. (p. 23) 

From there he moved to Williams College in Massachusetts and graduated in two years. He entered state politics in Ohio, then served in the Civil War in the Union Army, after which he was elected to Congress. He did NOT want to be president. He attended a nominating convention which was hopelessly deadlocked. On the 34th ballot, some electors voted for him. He rose to protest and was told to sit down.  On the 36th ballot, he became the Republican nominee – against his will. He was described as shocked, sickened, and pale as death during the proceedings. (pp 40-46).

He never participated in the campaign which was conducted on his behalf, preferring to work and receive visitors on his 160-acre farm.

He built a barn, moved a large shed, planted an orchard, and even shopped for curtains for the house…. he added an entire story, a front porch, and a library. Even with the new library, Garfield’s books filled every room. “You can go nowhere in the general’s home without coming face to face with books,” one reporter marveled. “They confront you in the hall when you enter, in the parlor and the sitting room, in the dining-room and even in the bath-room…” (p. 58) 

His campaign platform as a Republican emphasized civil rights and the welfare of the freed slaves, in which endeavor he was supported by Frederick Douglass. Voter turnout for the election was 78%, and he was elected by a narrow margin.

In the days that followed… Garfield could not shake the feeling that the presidency would bring hi only loneliness and sorrow. As he watched everything he treasured – his time with his children, his books, and his farm – abruptly disappear, he understood that the life he had known was gone. The presidency seemed to him not a great accomplishment but a “bleak mountain” that he was obliged to ascend. (p. 64) 

The assassin, Charles Guiteau, was a religious fanatic who was delusional to the point of frank psychosis. He borrowed $10 to buy a gun, used it to shoot the president not for any political or philosophical reason, but because he believed God wanted him to do it.

His first and primary defense was “Insanity, in that it was God’s act and not mine. The Divine pressure on me to remove the president was so enormous that it destroyed my free agency and therefore I am not legally responsible for my act.” (p. 237) 

The “insanity defense” was well established at the time. Interestingly, everyone at the time agreed that Guiteau was insane and that insane people were not liable for their actions. Everyone on the jury knew this also, but they were so angry that they basically said “he’s guilty – hang him anyway.”

Other interesting tidbits from the book: After Garfield was shot, the second physician who responded to the event was Charles Purvis, surgeon in chief of the Freedmen’s Hospital, 39 years old, one of the first black men in the U.S. to receive medical training at a university, and obviously the first ever to treat a president. (p. 140)

The White House of that era was like a slum residence, perpetually damp with rotting wood and vermin-infested walls and the odor of raw untreated sewage, situated next to a malarial tidal marsh. (p. 176)

Garfield was a Republican who embodied the party’s enthusiasm for helping immigrants, freed slaves, and impoverished people. He believed the key to improving the country lay in educating those people. (182)

It has been said that Guiteau did not kill the President – he shot him, but the doctors killed him by repeatedly probing the wound with ungloved, unwashed fingers. Guiteau used this argument in his own futile defense (“General Garfield died from malpractice.”). The bullet had lodged on the left side of his body behind the pancreas, but the attempts to find it on the right side resulted in profound septic sequelae:

One cavity in particular, which began at the site of the wound, would eventually burrow a tunnel that stretched past Garfield’s right kidney, along the outer lining of his stomach, and down nearly to his groin. An enormous cavity, six inches by four inches, would form under his liver, filling with a greenish-yellow mixture of pus and bile. (p. 196) 

He apparently developed septic emboli:

Just two weeks after the surgery, another abscess formed, this one on Garfield’s right parotid gland… the abscess had become so filled with pus that it caused his eye and cheek to swell and paralyzed his face. Finally, it ruptured, flooding Garfield’s ear canal and mouth with so much pus… that it nearly drowned him. (p. 216) 

The woefully incompetent Dr. Bliss treating him [“Ignorance is Bliss”] tried to cope with the president's rapid cachexia by feeding him intrarectally. The eventual cause of death (determined by autopsy) was hypovolemic shock following a rupture of the splenic artery (probably from a septic aneurysm).

Garfield does not get credit for any particular legislative achievements, because his time in office was too brief. Rather, his legacy is reflected in how his illness and death united the people of the country during the fractious time in the aftermath of the Civil War. And since Guiteau’s act had arisen in connection with the corrupt “spoils system” for giving out lucrative government job contracts, the popular revolt after the death led to the establishment of the civil service system. After his death, Garfield’s widow assembled his books and papers in a wing of their farmhouse, establishing the nation’s first-ever presidential library. 

The book is Destiny of the Republic. A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard, published by Doubleday in 2011. I'm pleased to add it to my list of recommended books.

Addendum 2016:
I am delighted to report that the superb television series American Experience has just released a program entitled "Murder of a President," about President Garfield; it is based on the book I reviewed above in 2012.  The two-hour program is playing on PBS stations around the country, and it can be viewed online here.

Reposted from 2016 because of the upcoming Netflix series Death by Lightning, which is scheduled to drop later this year.

Reposted from June because the Netflix series drops in two days.  Watched the first two episodes tonight.  They follow the history quite faithfully; it was a bit sad to watch because I know what's going to happen next.