French mode...

Yesterday's bag ended up with four rush jobs, which made for a large corpus of nervous energy floating around the area, counterbalanced by the numbers on the resulting invoices. (It's not that I charge extra for rush work, mind you, as I would probably be working about as fast anyway, which is not to say that I'll refuse a rush rate, by any means!)

I got up late today (8 am) owing mostly to having watched Knute Rockne, All-American last night, starring Pat O'Brien and Ronald Reagan. I thought I'd never seen the film before, but the scene where Rockne takes inspiration from a chorus line performance (and later applies it to his backfield) tickled a few neurons somewhere, so I must have seen it at one time, perhaps in my youth. It probably says a lot about Rockne that so many real people - Jim Thorpe in a cameo and "Pop" Warner as himself, among others - agreed to come together and appear in the picture.

At any rate I enjoyed the film, though I could not help but wonder what kind of reception a film of this kind would get today. We moderns, it seems, just won't accept a hero unless he or she has some clay on their feet, or at least I can't recall any such stories in recent times. In the film, Rockne's major character flaw seems to have been his choosing coaching as a career over chemistry.

I've got to leave in a few minutes to go help Drew at the store. Yesterday, I walked to the store and biked back home. Today, things'll be more interesting, as I've been invited over to the Mike and Karen's, but have no earthly idea of how I'll get there (I'm suspecting either a lift from Drew or my bike), or especially how I'll get back (I'm again leaning toward Drew). We'll see.

I spent the last 40 minutes or so adding about 3200 words to my nascent French-English technical glossary, this latest batch from a glossary file someone gave me at Baikonur, which seems to have a lot of useful terminology. How useful will be demonstrated tomorrow, as I steam headlong into the Big French Assignment (aka, the BFA™).

Gotta go get ready for the store.

Cheers...

On the nature of pennies...

Via survivalblog, a feed created by LJ friend kitiara, I read a letter a little while ago from one "Mr. Bravo" on "What use is a penny?"

The upshot of the post was that currency and coinage could be simplified by dropping the penny, and apparently, the nickel as well. While that's true as far as it goes, there would be even greater simplification if you eliminated coins completely, no? However, the last time I looked, simplification, while convenient, is not the paramount reason behind a system of currency.

In my opinion, if the penny (not to mention the nickel) were to be eliminated, the economic consequences of such a move would not be pleasant, especially for people making minimum wage, which makes all the more strange a supplemental point marshaled by Mr. B, to wit:

What earthly reason could there be for monetary increments less than the value of one minute of a minimum wage (~$6/hr) laborer’s time?

The answer: because there are things out there that are worth less than one minute of such a laborer's time!

Case in point: the increase in the cost of a postage stamp.

The U.S. post office was required by a 2003 law to cough $3.1 billion into an escrow account annually, which explains the 2-cent increase earlier this year, from 37 cents for a first-class stamp, to 39 cents (a little over 5%). Without pennies, the minimum increase could only be a nickel, or about 12%. Without nickels as well, the minimum increase would  result in a nearly 30% increase the price of a stamp.

You tell me, which alternative is best for someone making the minimum wage? (Sure, the quantity of money we're talking about is small, but I'm trying to get at the principle.) Which alternative is best for keeping the seller in check?

The problem with the general argument, i.e., that it makes no sense to have pennies around if there's nothing of value that can be bought with anything less than five pennies, is that there are things of value out there that can be bought for less than five pennies (from the consumer's perspective), or accumulated from payments of less than five pennies (from the government's perspective). Like it or not, pennies do add up.

Cheers...