Kg v pound

[John Walliker]

Yes, I use that ISP as well. They will do lunar billing if you ask for it. The default is ordinary monthly however.

From their website:

The following billing periods are available. They relate to all services on the account. We recommend calendar monthly. Calendar monthly: Invoices are for the whole calendar month from the 1st of each month. Four Weekly: Invoices cover a 4 week period, the exact starting week can be adjusted if required (e.g. to align with salary or benefit payments arriving). Prices are based on 23% of our monthly rates for each week billed. Lunar monthly: Invoices are issued each full moon for the period to the day before the next full moon. Prices are based on 97% of our monthly rate for each lunar cycle. Yes, we really do this and we really have customers that use it. Quarterly: Invoices are for Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun, Jul-Sep, and Oct-Dec. We can adjust which month the quarter starts on if necessary. See note below. Annually: Invoices are for the whole year from 1st Jan. We do not normally provide annual billing. We can adjust which month the year starts on if necessary. See note below.

John

[williamwright]

So old folk shouldn't be allowed to park?

Bill

[williamwright]

The value of the vouchers should be more for car owners.

Bill

[Fredxx]

That is my point. That the previous generation not only didn't pay enough for a pension pot, but left the treasury in deficit for the current generation to pay. Clearly they either didn't work hard enough or agree to pay higher taxes.

[Fredxx]

Quite, so the likes of Harry shouldn't complain, or suggest they worked hard enough for a pension others will be paying.

Not at the same level. Life expectancy hasn't always been this high.

At an older age.

Harry is of a generation that enjoys this longer life expectancy but will have retired at an earlier age than the current generation.

Quite.

[JNugent]

I wasn't aware that anyone in business used that definition of frequency, but "lunar monthly" is usually taken to mean 4-weekly.

See:

[JNugent]

13 times a year is what I would expect of an advertised "lunar monthly" charge.

I get my Retirement pension 13 times a year too.

[JNugent]

I'm not surprised to hear it.

[HVS]

On 04 Jul 2022, JNugent wrote

ISTR that when I set up the details for receiving my state pension, having it paid weekly was still an option. I went for the default of

4-weekly/13 payments per year, though.

[Ian Jackson]

After the company I worked for moved premises, we needed to apply for planning permission to put a name sign on the front of the building. The front was around 70 feet long, and the council wanted all dimensions in mm.

[Chris J Dixon]

Railway rolling stock, often around 26 metres long, are drawn dimensioned in mm.

Chris

[HVS]

On 05 Jul 2022, Ian Jackson wrote

Yes, that's standard for all technical/official drawings.

The centimetre is not an officially recognised SI unit.

[Ian Jackson]

In message [e-mail]>, "Dave Plowman (News)" [e-mail]> writes

When we went decimal, lots of low-priced stuff went up - largely because decimal price labels bore a certain similarity to LSD - for example a one-and-threppenny bottle of tomato sauce (1s/3d) could soon become 13p

- double the price.

[Ian Jackson]

In message [e-mail]>, Tim Lamb [e-mail]> writes

My small country village had a sweet shop, which opened at 9am. On the day sweets come off the ration, I recall a few of the kids being a bit late for school because had been were queuing up for the shop to open. [I suspect it might actually have opened a bit earlier that day.]

[JNugent]

Exactly.

When Australia and NZ went decimal in the mid-1960s, they decided to base their new dollars on the value of ten shillings rather than on their pounds. This did not lead to inflation or inflationary pressures and it reduced the tendency for new decimal amounts to look smaller than they were.

[Ian Jackson]

Exactly.

Unfortunately, it was decreed that the pound was sacrosanct, and to avoid confusing people we had to stick with it.

However, a ten bob New Pound would have had many advantages. Firstly, we would have had 10 existing shillings to the New Pound. Secondly, with a small upwards revaluation of the penny to 10 to the shilling (instead of

12), we could have retained the existing penny and sixpence coinage (as well, of course, the existing 10 shilling note until it was gradually taken out of circulation and replaced by a New Pound note). The 2 shilling (florin) coin could also have remained in circulation, although it might have been considered convenient to phase it out eventually.

The result would have been that instead of often ending up with a sometimes doubling of the price of low-priced items, very low-priced goods might actually have initially become slightly cheaper (although I'm sure that vendors would quickly have compensated for this). The only people likely to have been able to benefit from this upwards revaluation of the penny would have been those would be those with large hoards of pennies and sixpences - and it's pretty unlikely that they were many of these.

[Robin]

On 06/07/2022 17:15, Ian Jackson wrote: <snip>

There would have been as soon as the new system was announced. Who would have turned down the chance of a guaranteed 20 per cent gain, tax-free?

The Mint could not have produced new pennies [NB not New Pence!] fast enough to replace the pennies being hoarded. So pennies would have ceased circulating. Then what? Perhaps shops would have just had to round up prices to the nearest threepence.

[Ian Jackson]

It would hardly be worth while. There was (and still is) a legal tender limit to the amount of coins a recipient is obliged to accept as a payment for goods etc. See:

will see that for present-day UK coins, the limit for 1p and 2p coins is only 20p, and 5 pounds for 5p coins, and there were similar limits before we decimalised. So without a lot of effort you would hardly be likely to get rich quickly by lavishly spending your hoard of pennies and sixpences.

And in the course of normal day-to-day transactions it's unlikely that you would have been able to collect vast quantities of pennies and sixpences - and if you tried to get them in bulk at a bank, they would only give you their new value, ie only 100 pennies per 10 shilling New Pound, and not the previous 120 pennies. Even then, I think that the banks would probably place a limit on how many pennies or sixpences they would issue to you (or would take in from you if you were paying coins in).

The same goes for when you bought something. While you might buy a shilling packet of salted peanuts for 10 pennies, if the peanuts were only 9 pence, and you tendered a shilling, you would get only one penny change (and not three).

There would have been no immediate need to produce new currency (although they might have wanted to gradually replace the original sixpences with fivepences of the same physical size).

Maybe - but while they might be losing a little when customers occasionally used lots of pennies, they might gaining when giving pennies as change.

[Robin]

The site you linked to is as reliable as a 12 bob note.

"Legal tender has a very narrow and technical meaning in the settlement of debts. It means that a debtor cannot successfully be sued for non-payment if he pays into court in legal tender. It does not mean that any ordinary transaction has to take place in legal tender or only within the amount denominated by the legislation. Both parties are free to agree to accept any form of payment whether legal tender or otherwise according to their wishes. In order to comply with the very strict rules governing an actual legal tender it is necessary, for example, actually to offer the exact amount due because no change can be demanded."

You seem to be thinking only in terms of what happens after D-day.

Before D-day banks could not deny people access to pennies in bulk without causing difficulty to those traders who gave out more in change than they received.

There'd also have been nothing to stop people collecting pennies before D-day by the simple expedient of never tendering the right change. That would indeed have caused problems for shops, bus conductors etc. But I leave you to contemplate the problems if they'd tried to impose a "no change given" policy for the several years between announcement of the new basis and D-Day.

Again, I was referring to the years before D-day when coinage was being hoarded.

[Andrew]

One day, all the posts to uk.d-i-y could be done by AI too :-)