I think imperial time is 1 PM right now.....

What a jolly coincidence.

Here's my last question (I'm pretty much done debating this but what the hell).

Imagine that the US dollar would be just like the Imperial system. The smallest unit (read: coin/banknote) would be, say, a slice of bread (two pennies or something, I dunno). The next unit would be, say, a whole bread (say 0.652 dollars, just making this up). The next unit would be a meal. And so on and so on. The largest unit has the magnitude of a car, or a house. They'd be automatically corrected for inflation simultaneously.

So now you have your imperial money, that has lots of meaning for every subunit.

2 farthings = 1 halfpenny
2 halfpence = 1 penny (1 )
3 pence = 1 thruppence (3 )
6 pence = 1 sixpence (a 'tanner') (6 )
12 pence = 1 shilling (a bob) (1s)
2 shillings = 1 florin ( a 'two bob bit') (2s)
2 shillings and 6 pence = 1 half crown (2s 6 )
5 shillings = 1 Crown (5s)

What about the tuppence?

£1 (one pound) equalled 20 shillings or 240 pennies
1 guinea equalled one pound and one shilling

Simple :)

Well, I've got tuppence to spend and tuppence to lend, And tuppence to send home to my wife, poor wife.

1 Dutch guilder = 100 cents.

Done.

Such elegance, such simplicity. semck would hate the shit out of it.

There is arguably more elegance in the way the imperial system (at its best) would lend itself to division. Sadly the system we had was broken and fragmented by too many years of history. If it had been built from scratch to fit together a tad better I doubt metric would have ever caught on.

I wonder if there's any weight to the arguement that the mental workout that using old money would give you was good for the health of the nation?

1 dollar = 100 cents. Also simple. Coinage is simply in multiples of cents.

rh,

The system you describe is far, far more complicated than imperial units, due to the inflation correction. Conversion factors would never be known at any given time, unless everybody carried a daily pocket card from the Wall Street Journal. Certainly such a system's inconvenience would begin to outweigh its conveniences -- although the idea of pegging one or two aspects of currency to the price of something specific is certainly an interesting idea (and could be useful).

Also, having one for half a loaf of bread and another for a loaf of bread is a little too much, even if one was designing such a system.

If the ratios were fixed, then it could probably be useful, and this might explain why the old pound sterling was a useful system before inflation caught up with it.

smck,

You the man.

Seriously, defending Imperial units because "it's too late to change back to metric" or "people won't understand metric" etc. are cowardly arguments. You actually have the courage to defend Imperial as a superior system in itself. I take my hat off for thee. But I assure you, come live in Europe for an internship or something and you'll be hooked (and disgusted by a plethora of other things that don't concern distances and weights)

rh

How can anyone not understand metric, since we live in a metric monetary system.

Oh...wait...that's right, most American's can't figure out money/budget's to save their lives...

...disregard this comment...

Haha, thank you rh. ; )

By the way, I would like to apologize to the whole webdip community for misusing (or rather, not using) the subjunctive mood at the appropriate point in my previous post. I've been under a lot of stress lately, and I guess it's getting to me. I really feel bad about this, and I'll try not to let it happen again.

Back to your post: Isn't your argument symmetric? I might as well promise that you'll love imperial units if you come live in America for awhile.

I doubt an internship length is enough though, for either. I have spent time in Europe, and also in Canada. I'll probably do some more of both. I'll let you know if I ever start appreciating the metric system. ; )

*except in science, where I already appreciate it *very much.*

One easily forgives a man who has only Liberia and Myanmar on his side of the debate. ;-) On behalf of the pope and the whole webdip community I say: NO BIGGIE
Seriously though, you were in Europe?

And krellin, the same is true for most Europeans. And it's "Americans" and not "Americans", you'll want to spell that right before calling them idiots, as they, you know, live all around you. And Draugnar, I heart you for pointing out the obvious. YES, I got that.

krellin +1 - Of course, I did just spend an obscene amount of money on a car which now has higher monthly payments than my first home. :-)

Would it cost less if we converter out currency to some sort of base- 8 monetary measurement????

Base 16. We could have F-notes.

I'm down with base 16 money.

The questions is, when we valuate out new money, does this mean we can finally dispense with the penny? It's seriously time to make nickels the smallest monetary unit of currency for "real world" currency.

And maybe we can make a logarithmic monetary scale to track the national debt...<sigh...>

No, krellin. It means we start off with a penny that's only 5/8 the value of the present penney.

*penny. Yikes.

No....if you are starting with a brand new currency, you get to set the initial value, which will be based in part on how much currency you print and how much your total currency is valued at.

And...seriously...we should go back to the gold standard...

Please, please, please can we make the new currency an irrational multiple of the old currency? 1 hexadollar = pi old dollars, e.g.?

The hexapenny should be the SqRt of 2 for each dollar and the hexadollar be 10 Pi dollars.

I am personally a fan of the Big Mac standard, in which one dollar is held to the value of a Big Mac.

I think that could be problematic, abge -- it could just lead to Big Macs being priced away by competition, for example. You have to make it something that can't easily be replaced. For example, you could say a plumber makes $50/hour. But then, there are different quality plumbers. It's surprisingly hard to think of something that would actually work to fix a currency and not just distort a market.

Pi is the best number ever....I claim design rights on the Pi bill.

@Abge....ahhh....brilliant.