Posted on 04/02/2008 7:42:28 PM PDT by Richard Poe
Hmmm. Good question.
I think it's because I seldom meet a government employee who doesn't think they are significantly better than any mere citizen.
How big are 1/50th oz gold coins?
I don’t buy cigarettes, but groceries I get at the cutrate bag your own grocery store. I live in iowa.
If you’re paying more than 5 bucks for a gallon of milk, you need to shop somewhere else. Same for the gas.
I’ve paid just short of a C note filling up a pickup.
But you responded to the above post with this below:
Uh, a fiver does buy more than all that.
Now you state this below:
If you’re paying more than 5 bucks for a gallon of milk, you need to shop somewhere else. Same for the gas.
Which is it?
I think you missread something. The first line says “...a gallon of fuel, a gallon of milk, or a pack of cig...”
Notice the “or”. That means one of those things for 5 bucks. NOt all three for a total of 5 bucks.
And you stated this above.
What is the meaning of "all"?
Fine. I should’ve used “each”. But you already knew that.
I’ll drink to that!
No I didn’t know that. A mind reader I am not.
Are we talking new dollars or old dollars, here?
Thanks for the link. This is very important. I have posted the article below:
Look and Feel
The value of a coin or banknote depends on its familiarity
The Economist, April 3, 2008IF RATIONALITY reigned supreme in economics, travellers would spend their foreign cash based upon its value in the currency of their home country. All too often, however, they actually treat foreign banknotes as though they were Monopoly money. Given the unfamiliarity of other countries' currencies that is not, perhaps, surprising. But a piece of research about to be published in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review by Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer, a pair of psychologists at Princeton University, shows that something similar is true even of familiar currencies, depending on the form they come in. In particular, Dr Alter and Dr Oppenheimer have demonstrated that the perceived value of a dollar changes with the form that dollar takes.
For the first part of their study Dr Alter and Dr Oppenheimer picked 37 “volunteers” at random from the university's canteen. They asked them to estimate how many simple objects—gumballs, paperclips and pencils—they could purchase with either a standard dollar bill or a Susan B. Anthony dollar coin that was presented to them. Susan B. Anthony dollars are legal tender but, having been produced only from 1979-81 and then again in 1999, they are rarely seen in circulation.
After the volunteers had made their estimates, they were asked to indicate on a scale of one to seven how familiar they were with either the banknote or the coin. Dr Alter and Dr Oppenheimer were not surprised to find that all participants were less familiar with the coin than with the banknote. Nor were they that surprised to find a difference in how the participants valued coin and note (the expectation that there would be a difference was, after all, the point of doing the experiment). They were, however, flabbergasted by the size of the difference. People offered the banknote believed, on average, that they could use it to buy 83 paperclips, 72 napkins or 46 sweets. Those offered the coin thought 39 paperclips, 51 napkins or 27 sweets. In other words, the note was believed to be almost twice as valuable as the coin.
To check this result was not caused by some prejudice in favour of paper money and against coinage, Dr Alter and Dr Oppenheimer repeated the experiment offering either two single dollar bills or a single two-dollar bill. Like dollar coins, two-dollar bills are rarely found in circulation. The second set of results was virtually the same as the first. And when the study was conducted a third time with a real dollar bill and a subtly doctored version that had had, among other things, George Washington's head reversed, the results were, again, nearly the same. People, it seems, literally value familiarity.
Whether this observation has wider significance is unclear, but it may. Familiarity takes time to build up. It may have been unfamiliarity with the currency itself, rather than with its face value, which caused price gouging (or, at least, allegations of price gouging) when the euro was introduced. With that in mind, it might be wise for America's Federal Reserve to watch retail prices carefully when it introduces a new series of banknotes in August. With money, it seems, it is not familiarity, but unfamiliarity that breeds contempt.
-- from The Economist
omg, Nully, Richard Poe answered you. His own self! RP, will you answer me?? I’m afraid I’m star struck, I love your articles.
I didn’t know you posted here. I’m in awe. Now I’m going to have to go look up all your posts here.
Eat your heart out!
tee hee hee
Hmmm ~ like IRS auditors?
Them too.
Pretty much all of our ‘betters’ have that attitude to one degree or another.
Our overlords are working on banning or excessively taxing that as well.
I feel like a lil kid. I had no idea RP posted here!
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