Using Euro coins as weights (2004)
rubinghscience.org
rubinghscience.org
When I started doing this I didn't want to afford dedicated weights as it seemed like a waste of money, but I had many cents saved up from my childhood, which I started to use instead.
I have roughly 15kg in euro cents in my vest and I'm regularly talking walks with it.
To get one kilo you need 435 cents and it turns out that in Germany you can also "buy" coins "for free" at the "Bundesbank", that is, you can exchange actual money for weights without any fees. You give 4 euros and 35 cents and you get a kilo. Once you need the money back, you can also sell those coins back to them for free.
Some people think it's an exercise 'life hack'.
Strong recommendation for Nintendo switch for baseline fitness btw, these games are great for a 1-2 day 20 minutes workout/week for unfit office workers. Way better experience then the equivalent VR games.
I don't play too much VR these days, but enjoyed Beat Saber for "stationary movement", Gorn for beating up stuff and the VR ports of the original Serious Sam games for "run and shoot like a maniac".
The one's I've currently got installed on my quest 3 are
Supernatural Fitness (I need a VPN to play because they're geolocking it to USA). I find the way they try to "get personal" with the trainer super awkward.
FitXR (only one with decent passthrough gameplay) I dislike how most exercises are centered around "gyms", whenever you enter a session, there are others around you doing the same exercise as you and you get a scoreboard. It really doesn't vibe with me whatsoever. I also don't believe that I almost always get first or second place - I'm pretty sure this is showing you numbers to make you feel good about yourself.
XR workout It's the most "indie" of these and with the highest difficulty ceiling. It's biggest downfall is that it doesn't really give you a generated "I wanna exercise for 20 minutes" button. At least I couldn't find it.
There are also others, but I don't have them installed. I.e. Les milles etc
But as I said before: purely from a workout perspective, the Nintendo games work way better in my experience.
It's just so awkward in VR compared to Knockout Home Fitness, worse signalling what you need to do next - you're wearing a headset while getting sweaty - no center stage youre watching, instead youre just trying to guess which movement you're supposed to do while things randomly float around.
For the same reason, you probably won't see much benefit from such light weight over just walking a little faster or a little further.
Maybe I misundertand - how much weight are we talking about here?
I've used them on and off in the past; useful in limited circumstances.
There was a time in my life when my legs started hurting and shaking from muscle atrophy because I was programming too much and moving too little.
I was looking for a way to fix that issue and I didn't want to waste time going to a gym, so I started talking walks with a weighted vest. Walking is nice because you can think while walking and with a weighted vest you don't have to walk for hours for it to have a useful effect on your body.
For what goal? Increasing strength? I have my doubts.
If I'm working on increasing my deadlift's 1rm, doesn't matter if I practice deadlifting for 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, but never go above 10% of my current 1rm
It's on my todo list to 3d print some containers to replace the bags with actual "money rolls" so that I can remove them more easily.
Would it not be simple to create rolls of coins by simply wrapping a sheet of paper round a stack of them, once or twice around, a little bit of sellotape to hold the paper in place, including folding it over at both ends and taping there too? I'd imagine an A4 sheet would be more than enough for each stack of coins, cutting off what isn't needed, and since you wouldn't care about them being beautiful you wouldn't even need fresh paper and could just use paper that would otherwise go into recycling/trash (letters received, junk mail, etc.)
edit: I did a quick search which both confirmed people have made coin rolls using simple paper, and also that it's highly likely banks will offer pre-made paper holders for the various coin sizes that you can just ask for and get for free (with the bank assuming you'll be bringing them back full of coins - you could either ask for as many as you need, or just one per size and use it as a template for making more from plain paper like this guy does: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AvsOkp_WPxY )
One can of course go further and question if banknotes and coins should be called actually money. Today the nominal value is completely disconnected from what the metal is really worth, it's not like with gold coins back in the day. And once collective belief in the value is lost fiat money quickly becomes worthless. Zimbabwe and Venezuela are recent examples.
15 kilograms sounds excessive though, I bet the bank clerks hate that trick ;)
I do also suspect that there must be some product that must be more cost effective than coins but denser than sand, but cannot think of it right away. I mean, scrap steel is a couple of cents per kg.
The scrap steel probably didn't cost cents per kg when it was sold for its original purpose. You are paying for a useful shape.
A professional equivalent of weighted vests are ballistic plate carriers. Real ballistic plates can be fragile and expensive, so options for exercising in (or milsim games in airsoft etc.) include expired (and failed to re-certify) real ballistic plates, made for purpose training plates... or plate shaped sandbags!
The cents are free though, cause they're legal tender — just deposit them instead of having to sell 2nd hand
eg; weighing down the corners of a beach tent, pegs won't grip in the sand so instead tie plastic bags onto the guy ropes and fill them with sand and water.
As such, it's completely normal that you can't just take sand or stones from many beaches. The very famous Étretat town in France with its accompanying beach and rocks, have a very strict "don't take souvenirs from the beach because you'd be actively destroying it" policy.
Canadian National Parks[2] and most Provincial/Territorial Parks.
[0]: https://www.nps.gov/articles/recreational-collection-of-rock...
[1]: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-50/chapter-I/subchapter-C...
[2]: https://parks.canada.ca/voyage-travel/regles-rules#objects
Isn't Euro just from 2002? That surely is not that long time ago!
Free till you count inflation and opportunity cost. (What you could gian as interest with some other investment)
But yeah, probably still cheaper than some product from a store.
After the introduction of the Euro, all coins were counted in standard sized cups which also fit in the cashiers trays so no swapping needed, the error rate reduced to near zero (at counting, difference between amount on bag and what the bank told us was in it). Also, the machine was 500 grams instead of half a small room.
The same was applied to bank notes, as they also have a standard weight due to standerdized size and production method. This reduced the error rate even further as counting is difficult as it turns out if you want to do it at scale. It also made the task way faster. Theoretically the machine could count the notes in one go, but it mostly reported "error check notes" messages if you did that. Things like thick tape (for repair when the bank note was damaged) was enough to throw it off in some cases.
Those were interesting times, with people buying a 25ct item with a 250 note to not go to the bank to exchange old for new currency. (Fyi, you do not have to legally accept that as the due dilligence needed with high notes would outweigh the cost of the item).
Other anecdote: Also a lot of 50 euro fake notes showed up within months after introduction, easilly cought as they lit up like a freshly washed white shirt under UV light.
LOL, I worked for a bank branch located in a low socio-economic area. The pubs and bars would come in on Monday morning with huge wads of bank notes, wet with beer and whiskey, and it all had to be hand-counted as machines couldn't do it. We then had to bundle up excess notes and heat-shrink wrap them. I'm sure there were some pretty interesting bacterial colonies growing in there!
1, 2, 3, and 5 kopeck coins weighed their value in grams. They could also be used to estimate lengths; 1 kopeck was 15 mm in diameter and 5 kopeck was 25 mm.
According to wikipedia [1,2,3], as a physical coin it was minted periodically throughout Russian history. The Tatar origin of its informal historical name is either 'gold'[4] or 'six'[5].
It was last introduced in 1839-1841 and persisted into Soviet period, until 1991 when it was discontinued by the newly independent Russia. The 1/2/3/5 weight system had to be of the Soviet design, since the metric system was adopted following the Bolshevik revolution, but the weights and dimensions haven't changed since 1926 [6].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruble#Russia's_coins
[2] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D1%80%D0%B8_%D0%BA%D0%B...
[3] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D0%BB%D1%82%D1%8B%D0%BD...
[4] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%82%D1%8B%D0%B...
[5] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%82%D1%8B
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_ruble#Coins,_1924%E2%80...
Have you?
We use a pack of cigarettes as a gauge for one of the jobs we do. Quick, (not so) cheap, and readily available. May have to standardize on a vape though in the near future.
Of course there's a limit to the precision you can get from coins, but considering the scale of their production and the account of handling they see they are surprisingly good
It's been happening since ever.
Dime: 35 gr
Quarter: 87.5 gr
Half-dollar: 175 gr
Dollar: 350 gr
"Nickel" and "penny" break that pattern, with the first referencing the composition of the coin (originally called a "half-dime"), and penny is a measure of weight, varying by locale. The British penny is 1/240 of a Tower pound (later decimalised to 1/100 in the 1960s), whilst an American pennyweight (used for example in reference to nails) is 1/1000th of a pound.
So quarters weren't worth 25¢ because the government said so; they were worth 25¢ because they were made out of 25¢ worth of silver.
That's the same reason "peso" means "weight" and the "shekel" and "pound" take their name from units of weight.
This ended in 01965 in the USA, followed by the end of the gold standard, since which the dollar has lost 96% of its value relative to the precious metals that used to define it. The consensus among economists is that this is a good thing because it prevents deflation. I'm not sure.
You're not the only person I've seen do it on this site, and I can't recall ever seeing it not on this site, so I'm wondering if its because you're in the habit (or wanting to be in the habit) for some technical thing you do like working on a database that needs years in that format, or if there's some reason you feel that its better to write them that way in prose?
<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>
<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...>
Really though, it's a nice way to provoke some thought, and maybe even start to balance our rather extreme bias towards the very immediate future.
0: this
Why is this important?
Economists generally believe that the US's gradual shift from commodity money to fiat money over the period 01932–01971 was beneficial.
But I suspect that the shift to a fiat-money basis may be having some effects on the economy that are not well understood.
Inflation is something that is generally considered good by economists because it allows for growth. If the money supply is fixed at how much of a certain metal you have mined, then the economy cannot expand without the money deflating. Deflation completely stops growth because no one will lend, and people will be reluctant to spend something that gets more valuable over time.
It's possible that the mainstream economists are right, and that things would be far worse without the shift to fiat money, and it's just a coincidence that it happened at the same time everything started falling apart. We don't have anything like a controlled experiment. A lot of things happened to the US around 01971: the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the end of the Apollo program, the War on Drugs, the New Age movement, CREEP, rapprochement with the PRC, the energy crisis, the Clean Air Act, second-wave feminism, Love Canal, etc. Most of these seem like things you'd naïvely expect to reduce domestic economic inequality, though, however detrimental they might have been to the residents of Taipei and especially My Lai. So why did it skyrocket instead?
PG has an innocent explanation: as I understand it, he thinks companies suddenly had to compete for superstars in the job market, abandoning seniority-based pay and thus creating the yuppie and growing wealth inequality. But a plausible alternative explanation is that fiat money rewards elites in nonobvious ways, enabling them to concentrate ownership of the economic base in a smaller and smaller subset of the population. Certainly that was the merit Marco Polo claimed for paper money when he became the first European to describe it in writing.
It's not a widely accepted theory today, more associated with crackpots actually, but it certainly isn't new.
I don't think everyone agrees on that. There was a huge crash which posed an existential threat to capitalism in the middle of the first one.
> Most of these seem like things you'd naïvely expect to reduce domestic economic inequality, though, however detrimental they might have been to the residents of Taipei and especially My Lai. So why did it skyrocket instead?
What does any of this have to do with currency policy?
> But a plausible alternative explanation is that fiat money rewards elites in nonobvious ways, enabling them to concentrate ownership of the economic base in a smaller and smaller subset of the population.
Even more plausible than 'post-WWII cold war politics and domestic upheaval due to civil rights, the rise of the middle class, birth control and women getting control over their own lives caused society to shift in unexpected ways and gained reactions from all segments of society which shape our modern world'?
> It's not a widely accepted theory today, more associated with crackpots actually, but it certainly isn't new.
Yet you are doing that thing where it is obvious that you believe this but won't say it openly.
Probably you would benefit from learning to engage with people capable of seriously considering ideas without embracing them, because it seems like you're looking for some kind of partisan struggle instead.
(I'm not going to, because currency arguments existed well before 1971; eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_silver#Climax . But if any of you all find anything, I'm all ears...)
First you make the stacks for 15.0, 15.5, .. 17.5, 18.0. Preferrably using tiny amounts of superglue.
Then you put one stack on one side of the scales, and the other stack on the other side, and you have accurate weights for 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0.
You can make some of these combinations more efficiently, but the more coins you use in total, the better accuracy you get as manufacturing variations average out (up to a certain point of course).
It is a bit more cumbersome to make a quarter gram, but you can make one stack of {5x 0.01, 2x 0.02, 1x 0.1, 1x 0.2} for a weight of 27.46 g, and one stack of {2x 0.02, 3x 0.05, 1x 0.01, 1x 0.2,} giving 27.72 g, for a difference of 0.26 g.
As others have mentioned, using Lego is a nice way to make high precision scales. Take a 1x16 Lego Technic brick with holes and balance it on a thick needle through the middle hole. Needle support can be built from other bricks. Use thin sewing thread and some bricks to hang some 6x8 plates from each end.
2p weighs twice as much as 1p.
10p weighs twice as much as 5p.
50p weighs 2.5x as much as 20p.
£2 weighs twice as much as £1.
(A4 sheet area is 1/16 of a square metre)
In this link is a table of the current weight of UK coins, including the ratio between each coin and the coin below it: https://chatgpt.com/share/67151004-3fd0-800c-b534-b5933a7305...
Confirmed with sources like https://thecoinexpert.co.uk/blog/what-do-uk-coins-weigh/ and https://www.royalmint.com/discover/uk-coins/coin-design-and-...
2p does weigh double 1p
10p does weigh double 5p
But 50p weighs 1.6x 20p
and £2 weighs 1.37x £1
So if you're either deep into a volcano or on the top of a cold mountain and need 0.001g precision, you might want to find an alternative way :)
I was considering picking up some accurate weights for calibrating the scale properly, but if nickels will work, I could probably figure out how to procure some nickels instead. Right now, I have a roll of quarters and zero nickels in the house. I was using one to open up my electric candles, but it went missing, so I'm using a dime instead.
I knew someone who got caught by the metropolitan police with a fairly ordinary amount of weed (which probably wouldn't have attracted anything more than a warning), but also with a set of weights. I think he got a suspended sentence in the end. Using coins and something innocuous which could be used as a balance would seem to make sense.
Every single customary unit is secretly defined according to the metric system!
1 kopeck - 1g
2 kopecks - 2g
3 kopecks - 3g
5 kopecks - 5g
(They didn't keep it proportional for 10+ probably because 5g is already a fairly hefty coin.)
Now that we’ve lived in a fiat-currency world for decades, it’s possible that new processes are being used as the concerns are different— anti-counterfeiting measures are more important than anti-shaving ones now, for instance.
See this German children's program: https://youtu.be/nBuSmbcp1AE (seems to only have German subtitles, but they are quite visual)
After exchanging them on a bank into useful money: the average Euro coin weights about 3.6 grams and has an average value of 7 cents. :-)
It left out 7.5g (it mentioned it above though). I guess if the definition of "combination" requires at least 2 coins then 7.5g doesn't count.
The precise five gram weight of the nickel was deliberate, but dates to the Civil War, a time when the US had no intention at all of moving to the metric system. It's rumored that a gram or two of weight was added to the coin on the premise that "five cents five grams" was a nice round number, but actually due to lobbying by moneyed interests who owned a nickel mine, so they could sell more nickel to the government.
"Uses the metric system" = uses standard metric units.
By the logic you lay out, the metric system itself doesn't use the metric system, seeing as the units are not defined by reference to SI terms but to natural constants. (And if your definition of the metric system includes both US customary units and natural constants, then your use of the phrase 'metric system' has ceased to signify anything meaningful.)
Of course the metric system doesn't use the metric system. How would that even work?
SI units are, as you point out, defined in terms of measured aspects of reality.
US customary units, on the other hand, are defined in terms of the metric system.
And yes, this means that both of them are grounded in measured aspects of reality. Again. How else could this possibly work? Measuring themselves, perhaps?
If US customary units were defined directly in terms of measurements, then they wouldn't use the metric system. They would only be interconvertible through those measurements, and if they weren't the same measurements, as they easily could not be, this would be an empirical process subject to further experiment and refinement.
But they're not. They're defined in terms of SI, making conversion a matter of arithmetic.
It's a load-bearing statement. I do understand how someone who lacks grounding in the physical sciences might not realize that. Glad to help.
Condescending and wrong, and all in defence of the facially farcical statement that the US uses the metric system. Not that US customary units are defined in terms of metric quantities, which is the moved goalpost you're now trying to defend, but that "the US uses the metric system".
Whether or not the US 'uses the metric system' is not contingent on what units US customary units are legally defined in reference to, that's merely trivia.* US customary units do not form part of the metric system, and metric units do not enjoy widespread use in the United States (with minor exceptions).
Ergo, the US does not use the metric system.
* And relatively recent trivia at that, US units were naturally not first defined in metric units, only later restated as such.
That is, traditional specie coin currency is standardised for quantity and quality, or at least is initially. Most states have found a need to devalue specie coin, and virtually any state with a sufficiently advanced financial system and institutional trust either settles on a fiat currency or adopts another country's fiat currency as its own standard. kragen is making a similar point here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41895405>.
For the latter, see the U.S. dollar which is either the or an officially accepted currency: Turks and Caicos and British Virgin Islands (both British overseas territories); Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba (all Dutch municipalities); the independent states of Ecuador, El Salvador, Timor-Leste, Federated States of Micronesia, Republic of Palau, and the Marshall Islands; and quasi-official or widespread use in the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Costa Rica, Panama, Bermuda, Myanmar, Cambodia, Cayman Islands, Honduras, Nicaragua, Somalia, and Zimbabwe.
I've developed the view that seignorage, that is, the exchange value in excess of specie value of coinage, is effectively a measure of trust in a currency system, and that fiat currency in paper or even more so as ledger entries (written or electronic) express an extraordinary level of trust in a currency, the more so if that currency is widely accepted internationally.
Another interpretation is that money in a given economic region is the most widely accepted commodity, that is to say, the exchange medium which is accepted preferentially to any other. This need not be a conventional currency (e.g., commodity or symbolic exchange of shells, hides, cattle, cigarettes, alcohol, laundry detergent, etc.), or the official currency of a region (though legal sanction and sanction of discharge of debt go a long way to establishing a currency within a given region). Multiple currencies may trade simultaneously, possibly in slightly differing contexts, and through much of history there has been at least some distinction between retail trade (often copper), wholesale (silver), and capital / government financing (gold). Adam Smith discusses this at great length in Wealth of Nations. Multi-metallic systems often involve variable exchange rates between different classes of money, and I've mused that this might be something worth reintroducing to modern financial systems.
One of the biggest problems with contemporary monetary theory is that issues at the retail level (wages and household spending) are difficult to address without creating inflationary asset spirals, including most notably of real estate, but also of stocks, other financial assets, and collectables (wines, art masterworks, memorabilia, etc.). One can in fact look to markets and auctions for such assets as one of several signs that monetary policy is in fact misfiring, in my opinion.
Matt Ridley isn't someone whose views I generally subscribe to, but in a Feb 2019 Intelligence Squared (UK) debate with Johan Norberg and David Runciman, Ridley made a throwaway comment that whilst "[m]arkets in goods and services for immediate consumption such as 'haircuts and hamburgers'work very well and efficiently in delivering innovation and efficiency ... markets in assets (goods for hoarding and resale) are 'so automatically prone to bubbles and crashes that it is hard to design them so they work at all'".
This apparently appears in his book The Rational Optimist, I'm finding via a FastGPT query:
<https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7776209-the-rational-opt...>
<https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/10684114-the-rational-...>
I strongly suspect Ridley was citing his own work in that debate, so thanks for prompting me to look that up.
There are various ways in which such iniquities might be addressed. Among the traditional approaches are various income supports, minimum wage, universal basic or guaranteed minimum incomes (UBI/GMI), on the wage side, a land value tax (tax on the unimproved value of land), an asset or wealth tax, and/or a transaction tax (particularly aimed at HFT).
Another possibility though suggests itself in my comment above about status as legal tender. That is, different currencies might be recognised as legal tender (discharging debt) only for a specific set of transactions. Normally we shy from this on efficiency grounds, but it seems to me that there might be a role that could be played especially in separating financial transactions markets from those in quotidian consumption. There are some early variants of this, largely in the form of expiring financial assistance, e.g., a debit card whose balance expires after a given time (1--5 years or so. In the US I believe SNAP benefits (grocery assistance) works this way, and I've heard of similar projects elsewhere. A health savings account in the US (a tax-deferred put-away plan for healthcare expenses not otherwise covered by insurance) is a similar mechanism.
And keep in mind: we're not limited to specific classes of specie (e.g., copper, silver, gold, iron, etc.), but could create and retire entire sets of currencies at will, though I'd suggest at the very least starting with a limited set, and targeting general areas of financial activity, again, wage/retail, wholesale, fiance, government spending (possibly at multiple levels), and international exchange being more obvious candidates.
Related concepts are of insurance or financing of specific assets or transactions. We're in the midst of finding out what uninsurability will mean for real estate markets in disaster-prone areas (wildfires in the US West, hurricanes along the US Gulf Coast and Southestern Seaboard). Paul Baran, co-inventor of packet-switched networks mentioned insurance redlining and its effects on inner-city homeowners and small businesses in a 1968 monograph, "On the Future Computer Era: Modification of the American Character and the Role of the Engineer, or, A Little Caution in the Haste to Number":
<https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P3780.html>
<https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2008/P3780...> (PDF) (p. 6)
James Burke discussed a similar situation (reluctance of funding syndicates to underwrite fancy "new unprooved" technology) in severely retarding adoption of lateen-rigged sailing ships, in the TV series / book Connections. (These had been used for about a thousand years by Arabic and Indian sailors, but weren't adopted in Europe until the 1500s or so.) For specific types of transactions, mandating payment in the appropriate monetary type in order to qualify for insurance or certification might work.
The net effect would still be porous, but even porous systems can be managed so long as they impose sufficient frictions. And yes there might be exchanges between currency systems, but so long as those are also somewhat managed (e.g., with reporting, taxes/fees, etc.) this need not be a free-for-all.
And in the meantime, it would be possible for central banks to inject money into specific sectors of the economy, at least distinguishing between, say, wage/retail, wholesale, and finance, and quite possibly even more finely.