(a snip)
I'm also the wrong side of 50, just the right side of 60. I'm sorry to hear about your father's problems with Glaucoma. I also suffer from this and have had laser treatment. I hesitate to ask in a way. I might gain from his loss. I would seriously appreciate knowing what the botch was so that I could avoid it.
Many thanks for sharing the information with us.
on 1/17/2009 8:17 AM (ET) Ed Pawlowski wrote the following:
When was the last time you saw a half dollar coin in circulation?
yesterday.
Sorry, I'm afraid I don't really have a lot of details to offer, and I could even be misremembering glaucoma for something else. He has spent
50+ years at a drafting board, and he needed both eyes done. Good thing SOP is to only do one at a time. Anyway, he didn't follow a proper diet until the last decade or so, and thus had mild diabetes as a complicating factor. After the first op actually made that eye worse, he declined to proceed with the second one, and went to a different doc for some other kind of treatment. I only see him in person a couple weeks a year, and he doesn't like to dwell on his medical problems (he hates to worry his kids), so I don't press the issue. A busted hip and other serious medical problems have made the eyes no more than a minor annoyance to him.I fix his computer, catch up the yard chores and household repairs, and just in general try to make whatever time he has left as non-irritating as possible. Last month I made him an all-terrain walker for outdoor use, with plastic 7" lawnmower wheels on all 4 corners. Thank heavens that town still has an old-timey hardware shop with oddball bolts and bushings and such.His problems, along with some eye problems I had as a kid, have given me what you might call enhanced paranoia about protecting my eyesight.
-- aem sends...
The beauty of coins is that you don't have to study them. So I think the point was that we already have a system of very dissimilar easy to recognize coins and some bureaucratic government committee made a clueless decision.
All of this detracts from the "real" reason people prefer dollar bills to dollar coins. It is because they prefer bills to coins period.
If a cashier asked "Would you rather have ten dimes or a dollar bill?" you most people would opt for the dollar bill. Yet nobody goes around saying that people will never accept the dime as currency.
As long as a dollar bill is an option of course people will prefer that to a dollar coin. The way to get people to accept dollar coins is to stop making dollar bills. Then the choice would be a single dollar coin versus numerous other combinations of smaller coins. In that case people would prefer the single coin and how difficult it is to distinguish from a quarter would have zero to do with it.
Nate Nagel wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@news4.newsguy.com:
So, money makes a guys pants sag..kids make a woman's ass sag is the conclusion I get.
It is not u ncommon in Europe to see men with a change purse of sorts. The smallest paper Euro is the E5. I never found it to be unwieldy though once you get used to it. Same with the different sized bills. Makes sorting them in the billfoald simple.
On 1/18/2009 9:56 AM Rick Brandt spake thus:
It's not just a matter of preference: dollar coins are used in some vending machines, like on the Muni Metro here in San Francisco.
On Sun, 18 Jan 2009 21:56:21 -0500, "Ed Pawlowski" wrote Re Re: OT: Walmart facing competition!:
No surprise there.
On Sat, 17 Jan 2009 11:25:18 -0800, David Nebenzahl wrote Re Re: OT: Walmart facing competition!:
And thus makes it extremely easy to give a $1 coin when $0.25 was intended.
Same with the NYC TA. The machines dispense those coins as change and also accept them.
Late post on this. It does surprise me that the US uses both coins and folds that are difficult to distinguish. Europe (the Eurozone) and the UK use coins and folds that are easy to identify.
I guess that the main reason is nostalgia.
It's a while since I was in Sweden, Norway or Finland, but their notes and coins were easy to distinguish.
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