pennies

18 years ago

[ LJ Poll 467064 ]

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Current Music: Nimpf -- Lonesome Town ♬

35 Responses:

  1. bdu says:
    18 years ago at 12:58 pm

    One of the more recent mythbusters eps did the "derail train" myth as well.
    • jwz says:
      18 years ago at 12:59 pm

      I thought that was the same ep. Maybe not.
      • bdu says:
        18 years ago at 1:13 pm

        No, you're right, my bad.
        • vxo says:
          18 years ago at 1:49 pm

          They come out looking really neat after being run over by a train.

          I was rather sternly reprimanded by a Tri-Rail conductor one day for putting a penny on the track at a station - he told me that one's not really supposed to do it, but if you do, to do so away from any stations or crossings. The train sometimes flings them at high speed, and they don't want anyone injured.
          • reify says:
            18 years ago at 7:22 pm

            one of my favorite artifacts from my youth is the bulbous, extended-snowman result of my father laying a series of all the coin denominations on the track of an oncoming train. they all fused together into a weird sort of magic wand which was cool enough in a couple minutes to hand around and peer at, trying to make out the squished dead presidents. my real introduction to the physical properties of metals.
  2. duskwuff says:
    18 years ago at 1:06 pm

    I prefer to store them discreetly in my couch.
    • nmccoy says:
      18 years ago at 2:32 pm

      But even when you do so, you're doing it discretely, a penny at a time. Unless you somehow manage to continuously store pennies in your couch?
  3. gths says:
    18 years ago at 1:44 pm

    Oh yeah, the ol' drop them off a skyscraper thing. High school physics is Fun!

    Anyway, we Aussies did away with 1c and 2c coins back in the 80s, just a few years before plastic notes came in.
  4. valacosa says:
    18 years ago at 7:35 pm

    My system:
    "Large" purchases (> $3.00) I tend to split bills on and keep all change. Then when I buy a coffee or something I can pay with exact change including, yes, pennies.

    Of course I'm in Ontario, Canada so it's different. The smallest bill still used up here is $5. So $1 and $2 are both coins and count as "change".

    When I visited the US a couple of months ago it was eerie for me to pay for something with a $5 bill and get four bills back...
  5. lars_larsen says:
    18 years ago at 11:06 pm

    You all handle my ass pennies!
  6. thebitterguy says:
    18 years ago at 1:11 am

    Coinstar is evil. Because you can just sit around forever and go "I COULD count them all and put them into rolls and take them down to my bank and get back the EXACT amount, or lose 8.9% BUT not have to do any actual WORK and get to play a sort of Video Game."
    • jkonrath says:
      18 years ago at 5:45 am

      My bank doesn't even take them in the rolls if you go buy some and do it yourself, the prick bastards. I guess it makes sense, because if they did, I'd be spending all day trying to figure out what dead animal parts I could put in the middle of a roll of quarters so it would weigh the same and cost less.
  7. phoenixredux says:
    18 years ago at 1:31 am

    Actually, I prefer to melt them with a big Fresnel lens
  8. jkonrath says:
    18 years ago at 5:49 am

    You could always shrink your pennies:

    http://205.243.100.155/frames/shrinkergallery.html

    You can also make a hollow penny by carefully grinding back one of the edges until you can see the zinc core, and then dropping it in some hydrochloric acid for a few days. It's pretty neat, it looks like the wrapper to one of those chocolate coin candies when you're done.
  9. klahnako says:
    18 years ago at 7:59 am

    I spend them. For each purchase indiscriminately give the cashier n pennies as defined

    n = (*100) mod 5

    I used to take a handful with me each day as I was getting rid of them. Now, it is easy to keep on top of it.
  10. feyandstrange says:
    18 years ago at 8:06 am

    I throw them in a penny jar. Back when I lived in an affluent neighborhood, we kept said jar by the door for if anyone came by collecting for charity. These days I take it to CoinStar once a year. Many CoinStar machines also accept charitable donations, so I dump half the jar in for the Red Cross (or whatever my budget can take).

    It's also a lot harder to store pennies in a futon couch, I've discovered.
  11. jwz says:
    18 years ago at 8:44 pm

    I can't believe that a large majority of you think that pennies are made of money!
  12. livejournalsux says:
    18 years ago at 1:50 am

    I like to leave the coins on the counter and say, "keep the change big guy."
  13. d1663m says:
    18 years ago at 5:01 am

    Pennies are crappy. We should get rid of them. Right? Well, many countries have done just that. Then what happens? Your next lowest coin becomes the new junk coin. I was in Sweden for a while in college, they're up to dimes. :) Except their 10 "cent" coin is worth even less than our penny (or was at the time).

    We can start down that road, but I don't think it'll do us any good. Next, people will start hoarding Nickels. The gov't will have to redesign them to make them smaller and cheaper like pennies, and so-on.

    Find a bank that will take them from you and use them to open an account. :) Let the money sit there forever and add to it when your collection gets out of hand again. In 30 or 40 years you'll be able to retire and live off the intrest from your spare change. Or not...

    Alternately, you can take them to the post office, they have (had) a machine that accepted pennies for stamps. Lately that hasn't been working in favor of a postage machine with a CC reader. Hehe, I charged $0.37 so I could mail a letter. I think it cost them $0.50 just to process the charge. :P
    • jwz says:
      18 years ago at 7:50 am

      See, that's fine. I would have no problem with all coins vanishing in favor of paper. They take up too much space, and I don't like making noise when I walk. It totally destroys my ninja fantasy.
      • d1663m says:
        18 years ago at 12:14 am

        Gah! I don't want everything rounded to the nearest DOLLAR!
        • jwz says:
          18 years ago at 8:33 am

          It's ok, the dollar will be worth a quarter any day now.
          • d1663m says:
            18 years ago at 5:41 am

            I like dollar coins, but they're useless because extremely few machines accept them. They would probably be more reliable than a wrinkly dollar bill.

            Maybe if they started making the coins out of plastic they wouldn't make so much noise. As a bonus you wouldn't look like a thug/playa with your pants halfway down your buttcrack if you had your pockets full of coins.

            We need something as anonymous as cash/coin but without the inconveniences. Not sure that's entirely possible.
      • belgand says:
        18 years ago at 11:15 am

        It took a few minutes, but at first I thought I'd found the only other person in favor of my crackpot theory that we should have bills in even smaller denominations. Mainly just quarters because they're the only coin I ever really manage to give a shit about.

        Then again, quarters are the perfect coin: a good size to do coin tricks with, good heft, large enough to spot when you see one lying on the ground. Easily converted into actual dollars, and actually useful to buy a damn soda or something.
    • luminalflux says:
      18 years ago at 5:05 pm

      Sweden discontinued the 10 öre coin in 92.
      • d1663m says:
        18 years ago at 12:16 am

        Interesting, I was there Aug 90, to around Jan 91. I have a small jar of 10 öre coins and other various change from all over europe... somewhere.
    • vatine says:
      18 years ago at 2:13 am

      Do you mean 0.10 SEK or "value equivalent to dime"? TTBOMK the smallest coin in Sweden is the 0.50 SEK and taht's probably worth... about 7 cents. The Swedish 0.10 SEK coin (10 öre) has hovered between about 0.9 cents and 2 cents over the last 20-odd years (it would've been at 1.3 cents, but it hasn't been around for about 10 years).
  14. joel says:
    18 years ago at 1:29 am

  15. jef_poskanzer says:
    18 years ago at 3:55 am

    I once made a giant penny out of pennies. Here's a photo of a very small part of it:

    http://www.acme.com/jef/photos/d3909/d3909i0035.html
  16. k8to says:
    18 years ago at 8:52 pm

    The reason to spend pennies is twofold:

    1 - It gets rid of the pennies.
    2 - It prevents them from giving you MORE pennies.

    I suppose leaving the pennies on the counter is roughly similar, but I enjoy the satisfaction of them not being able to even try to give me pennies.

Comments are closed because this post is 18 years old.