Is It Time to Kill the Penny? - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2020/07/14/890435359/is-it-time-to-kill-the-penny <comment><USER2> Yes.

Canada stopped producing pennies in the fall of 2012. [0] The sky didn't fall. There was no great debate, no public opinion polls and politicians swearing heartily about the demise of our great nation. (Ok that's probably not true. For too many politicians that's all they do.)

There was resistance when Canada dropped the $1 bill in favour of a Loonie (a $1 coin with the image of a loon on it). People bitched about having too much change in there pocket, pockets became too heavy, etc. I do however see more coins in tip & donation jars now then I ever saw paper money.

This is a key difference between US policy & Canadian policy that I have informally noticed while growing up on the border (with family ties on both sides).

Canadian government: We think it's a good idea, so we're going to do it.

US Government: Lets have more opinion polls, and countless politicians swearing against any decent public reform or change to the status quo. Watch the media whip the public up into a frenzy. I guaranty that this will create a more frantic response and airtime then the BLM & Police Reform protests did.

Side note: If you drop the penny, for the love of $diety change your sales tax structure so that it's a multiple of 5. 5%, 10%, 15%, etc... Since Canada changed but left the taxes the same (14% in Ontario IIRC) there seems to be a lot of rounding-off in favour of companies instead of consumers. $0.01-$0.02 per transaction * millions of transactions per day has got to make some accountants happy.

[0][https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-s-penny-withdrawal- all...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-s-penny-withdrawal-all-you-need- to-know-1.1174547)

<comment><USER3> > Since Canada changed but left the taxes the same (14% in Ontario IIRC) there > seems to be a lot of rounding-off in favour of companies instead of > consumers. $0.01-$0.02 per transaction

This assertion is wrong. If the item you buy is $1.00, then after your 14% tax it will be $1.14, which is rounded up to $1.15. If the item is $2.00, then after tax it is $2.28, which also rounds up to $2.30. But if the item is $3.00, then after tax it is $3.42, which rounds down to $3.40. If the item is $4.00, then after tax it is $4.56, which rounds down to $4.55.

Secondly, the rounding to nearest nickel is done per transaction, not per item. So if you go to a supermarket and pick up 3 items costing exactly $1.00, then the total you owe is $3.42 (which becomes $3.40 in cash), and it is that amount that is subjected to rounding, not the individual items (which are $1.13 and would round to $1.15).

I live in Toronto and have analyzed my retail receipts. (I'm aware the HST is currently 13% but that's not relevant to this argument.) The rule about rounding to the nearest nickel is sensible enough, but I've witnessed various weird behaviors. For example, each vendor has a different kind of wording to show how they rounded your cash transaction. Some use a negative sign to show that the penny rounding deducted money from your total owed, while some use a negative sign to show that the penny rounding increased your total owed (as if you paid negative money). Also, a few vendors always round down to the nearest 5 cents (to appear nice to the customer), which causes a surprise when I'm trying to prepare the correct amount of change. Finally, some vendors don't display cash rounding on their receipts, so for them it is an oral culture that isn't formally written down.

<comment><USER4> Regardless of what the practice is in Canada, I have zero faith in literally any US business to round down on anything, at anytime, for any reason at all. It will, I guarantee, be round up on everything.

<comment><USER5> Note that you can also, while you're at it, abolish rounding.

You already have this in some sense on gas pumps: the price advertised has taxes included so you are not always playing guess-the-final-total with your money. Just pass a law that requires fair advertising of the actual amount the purchaser will pay, taxes etc. included. If there are special circumstances that might make certain people exempt from a tax -- SNAP is sales-tax free, for instance -- there are several ways to handle that but it's clearer when phrased as a discount rather than as an evasion of a tax.

<comment><USER6> Well, yes, this... I am European and during my brief stay in the USA the fact that taxes were added at the cashier was awkward. I am sure you had your reasons and if you grow up in that sustem you won't notice much, but it looks a bit counterintuitive to foreigners.

<comment><USER7> It's insisted upon by anti-tax advocates, so that Americans always get reminded about exactly how much the government is adding onto the price. Otherwise, the theory goes, we would get too happy about taxes.

<comment><USER8> Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think there is any law that says businesses have to add sales tax on separately. Since it's the business who actually pays the tax not the consumer they could just take it out of their own profits.

However, the reason I think stores do this is: If store A is selling candy bars for $1 (+ $0.05 tax at register) and store B is selling candy bars for $1.05. Most people would buy their candy from store A because their prices are lower.

<comment><USER7> Sometimes stores will structure sales that way ("we pay the sales tax" sales), so I expect you're right.

The situation where it comes up is the idea of an American VAT. Because it applies the tax before the store even sees the good, the tax ends up baked into the price. And people like Grover Norquist have argued against a VAT specifically because of that: "The VAT is embedded inside the price of a good (as opposed to the U.S., where sales tax is transparent and on top of the price). As such, people forget they pay it, and European governments have found it too easy to raise the tax repeatedly over time."

[https://humanevents.com/2010/04/23/dont-give-obama-a- vat/](https://humanevents.com/2010/04/23/dont-give-obama-a-vat/)

<comment><USER9> I love how the argument being played is that VAT is used to fed a big government. Like the US is huge, it requires a large government..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The best plan is to re-base all pennies to be worth 5¢, as described by Austan Goolsbee here:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/business/01scenes.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/business/01scenes.html)

This is (very) mildly stimulative/inflationary, and in the time leading up to en expected re-basing, accelerates the phase-out of the 1¢ penny (as people hoard in expectation of a 5x return). But as of the moment of re-basing, it flushes all those penny-jars out into spending/circulation.

Congress could do this tomorrow, effective immediately or in a week or month. Maybe the Treasury Department/Administration could do it on their own authority.

(The only significant opposition is likely to be from suppliers of nickel- minting metals. So maybe we just rebase pennies as 10¢.)

<comment><USER11> > _The best plan is to re-base all pennies to be worth 5¢_

But they say "ONE CENT" on them.

<comment><USER10> They also say, 'Liberty', 'In God We Trust', & 'E Pluribus Unum'. Lots of writing on government-issued materials is false, ceremonial, outdated, or overridden by later acts.

If it really bothers you, you can file that off your pennies before spending them at 5¢ value. We won't mind.

<comment><USER12> I would check 18 U.S. Code §331 (fraudulently defacing currency) before doing that.

<comment><USER10> There would be no fraud in scratching 'ONE CENT' off of pennies that were, by law, worth 5¢.

But also, when was the last prosecution for defacing a coin in the United States?

What sort of monster would call the police on a fellow person for passing a damaged penny?

How would the prosecution's burden of proof be met?

(Be a currency hacker, like Satoshi or Woz – [https://hackaday.com/2012/08/03/woz-prints-and-spend-his- own...](https://hackaday.com/2012/08/03/woz-prints-and-spend-his-own-2-bills/) – not someone whose actions are limited by obscure dead-letter laws.)

<comment><USER13> How is Woz a currency hacker in that link? He literally just buys sheets from [0] and glues them together.

[0][https://catalog.usmint.gov/paper-currency/uncut- currency/](https://catalog.usmint.gov/paper-currency/uncut-currency/)

<comment><USER10> The $2 bills are currency. He recombines them to create funny & thought- provoking situations, including encounters with local police & Secret Service, that test the boundaries of what's allowed & what's trusted.

What other definition of 'hacking' do you use?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As an American living in Canada, I gotta say. Pennies and dollar bills SUCK. We have $1 and $2 coins and they're actually useful. Every time I visit home, I end up with piles of pennies and wads of stinky, tattered, overcirculated garbage bills.

If you accumulate a pile $1 and $2 coins, nobody looks askance if you plunk down a stack of them. But god, the glares if you want to spend $20 in dollar bills.

I say take it further: nickels should go too, and probably dimes.

<comment><USER15> It wasn't until I went to the UK in my late 20s that I realized how badly America needs coins in the dollar and two dollar denomination. Having spare coins with weight and mass rather than loose dollar bills helped me get a sense of how many loose singles I had, and being able to drop a couple coins on a counter to pay for cheap items (a bag of M&Ms, a cup of coffee) is somehow, I don't know how, but somehow more ergonomic.

<comment> frosted-flakes The US actually has one dollar coins, and it's common for vending machines to spit them out as change. They're the exact same size as the Canadian loonie.

<comment><USER16> So is a 2p coin. But the only machines that can't tell them apart are candy dispensers and old mechanical parking meters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When someone posted an article about the coin shortage on Facebook recently, I realized that I haven't used cash for a purchase since sometime before the lockdown started. And even before that, my primary use of cash was the collections basket at church—which the lockdown has ended up transforming into a credit card transaction now. Our formerly cash transactions for our cleaning lady have converted into Zelle payments. Friends who also commented mentioned tipping delivery people although I prefer contactless delivery and always include the tip in the original payment rather than have to come close enough to a delivery person to hand off cash. Cash has long been on a decline and I think the pandemic is accelerating this to the point where it's going to end up being moot.

<comment><USER17> Coin-only laundry machines are probably the biggest drivers of persistent cash usage in most of my acquaintances' lives. I'm guessing that apartment buildings big enough to have in-building laundry rooms but small enough to not be able to justify a cashless payment system may just end up shifting to not charging for laundry.

<comment><USER18> I think that gap is growing smaller.

Sample size of one incoming, but the building I live in only has 16 2-room apartments and has a app-driven option for the machines (they take coins, but there's no change machines and I've never seen anyone actually do so)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In the Netherlands

> In 1980, production of the 1-cent coin ceased and was demonetized three > years later.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_guilder#Coins](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_guilder#Coins)

> In 1999 replaced by the Euro, and gained 1-cent and 2-cent coins.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_euro_cent_coin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_euro_cent_coin)

The one- and two-cent coins were initially introduced in order to ensure that the introduction of the euro was not used as an excuse by retailers to heavily round up prices. However, due to the cost to business and the mints of maintaining a circulation of low value coins, Belgium, Finland, Ireland, Italy and the Netherlands round prices to the nearest five cents (Swedish rounding) for cash payments, producing only a handful of those coins for collectors rather than general circulation.[3] Despite this, the coins are still legal tender and produced outside these states, so if a customer with a two-cent coin minted elsewhere wishes to pay with it, they may.[4]

The Dutch Bank calculated it would save $36 million a year by not using the smaller coins. According to a Eurobarometer survey of EU citizens, 64% across the Eurozone want their removal with prices rounded; with over 70% in Belgium, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and Slovakia.

<comment><USER20> The claim that 0.01€ coins produced elsewhere remain legal tender in the rounding countries, does not hold for Finland. No supermarket is going to accept 1- or 2-cent coins for payment even if you had enough to add up to the nearest 5-cent unit.

<comment><USER21> That doesn't mean they aren't still legal tender in Finland (which they are). Somewhat relatedly, some places also don't accept all the banknotes – that is, the largest denominations – a rule which clearly has nothing to do with the rounding rules of cents.

<comment><USER20> It feels like the discussion of "legal tender" on this thread is based on how things work in the USA. In Finland, one can be compelled to pay all kinds of debts and obligations by bank transfer, and cash is not accepted. Even banks won't take the 1- and 2-cent coins, and so these coins are de facto so marginalized that calling them "legal tender" misses the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> About 10 years ago my friends and I made a Web site, removethepenny.com (no longer active) and starting calling around to see who would support us. I recall speaking to someone who was very angry that we cared so little for the metal industry.

I think this has been known for a long time but special interests have kept it on life support for obvious reasons.

<comment><USER23> I'm not sure the reasons are so obvious. Surely very little metal is turned into pennies compared to the quantities consumed by industrial processes.

<comment><USER24> last year they made 8.4BN pennies, which would be about 21 million KG of Zinc, worth about ~$40 million?

<comment><USER23> That's a lot of money, but not "change public policy" levels of cash, either.

On the other side, handling pennies is expensive for businesses and banks, I bet it costs at least that much. There are special interests on both sides of this.

<comment><USER24> I'd imagine you also have to take into account all coin to cash machines that issue gift cards for change, and take decent percentages. They probably make several orders of magnitude more than the mineral companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The melt value of a copper penny (1982 or prior) is worth more than the face value. However, it's illegal to melt down legal tender currency. AND, fun fact, it's illegal to leave the US with more than $5 worth of pennies, so you can't drive to Canada with a bag of pennies and melt them there.

So some people are now starting to hoard copper pennies, waiting for the day when pennies are no longer legal tender, and then...they'll make a modest profit, I guess.

<comment><USER26> > it's illegal to leave the US with more than $5 worth of pennies, so you > can't drive to Canada with a bag of pennies and melt them there.

What law would that violate?

<comment><USER27> [https://twitter.com/crimeaday/status/739973139539632128](https://twitter.com/crimeaday/status/739973139539632128)

"31 USC §5111(d)(2), 31 CFR §82.1(b) & 82.2(a)(2) make it a federal crime to leave the US with more than $25 worth of pennies in your pocket."

Most of that is about penalties but 31 CFR §82.2(a) has the $5 and $25 rules: [https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/31/82.2](https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/31/82.2)

(I just guessed A Crime A Day had tweeted about this, US law seems to be mostly legacy code...)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> At some point us in the US will have to figure out how to cope with the issues our Democracy has with making changes and overcoming momentum. It seems our government is uniquely unsuited in this capacity in comparison to other modern democracies as seen with healthcare, income inequality, and the recent pandemic response.

<comment><USER29> I think the best approach is for the US to move more concerns to the state level. E.g., it would be great if states would start implementing their own universal healthcare for their residents.

States commonly have more internally aligned political goals and therefore can move quicker. It also has the benefit of allowing different states to experiment with different solutions and all states can learn from the results.

Lastly, inter-state mobility is much higher than inter-country and this will allow residents to congregate in a state that matches their political desires. E.g., if someone doesn't like the tax burden of states that provide more services then they can move to a state that provides fewer.

<comment><USER23> Trivial inter-state mobility is a big obstacle for states doing grand social programs individually.

If a state provided universal healthcare for residents, it'd quickly be overwhelmed with "hard cases" from other states where coverage is a problem. Which would drive up costs, and taxes, and drive productive/healthy people out.

See the current inter-state shipping of homeless people, especially those who suffer mental illness, that is often done via bus tickets paid for by local governments looking to shed those people.

<comment><USER30> Canada it is a "state"/provincial system. All provinces manage their own. Canada doesn't get inundated with Americans because if they do come, patients will be charged like private health care. If the patient's home province has universal health care, both province's will just work it out.

In general, we don't dump problems on to other provinces. It's bad form and federal courts will fix that quick especially with so much money on the line. If Florida state sends patients to a universal health care NY state for care, you can bet, NY State will be suing either residents of Florida for medical bills or Florida State directly.

<comment><USER31> The system here only works because the Canada Health Act requires every province to have a universal health insurer for provincial residents and mandates each province accept the insurance of the others. If only Ontario had a provincial insurer or the provinces didn't have to accept each other's programs there would be a ton of game theory style manipulation.

Any state trying to implement a single payer system would get crushed as tons of individuals and even other states tried to milk the system (like putting homeless people on a bus with a one way ticket).

States would need a "suicide pact" of sorts to ensure a bunch of states made the leap at the same time. There actually is such a plan to subvert the electoral college to ensure the popular vote winner always wins the presidency, but that's a relatively simple pact around single law. Health care laws a incredibly complex and rather than try some kind of weird multi-state pact you're better off fighting for a national law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I really like it that they offer you, instead of a site with a lot of junk and JS, a plain text version! That's much nicer news than the story itself :-)

... that said - why _don't_ you guys cancel the penny?

> Penny defenders' strongest argument was that eliminating it would hurt > consumers. All those $9.99 products? The prices would be jacked up to an > even $10!

That sounds like an argument made up retroactively to try to justify something. Seriously?

1\. The time and effort to handle penny change costs more.

2\. Those bargain prices will become $9.95 , and some other prices will rise slightly to compensate; or not.

<comment><USER33> Where I'm from, shops started using .95 pricing _long_ before the idea of scrapping 1c and 2c coins was raised, purely because handling those coins wasn't worth it.

A key difference is that we have VAT, which is built into the price, rather than a US-style sales tax, which is not. In the US, if you're handling cash you still have to deal with 1c and 2c coins because of that. That made it easier for us to scrap 1c and 2c coins, but creates resistance for any US attempts to do the same.

One other thing we did was introduce symmetrical rounding rules on the final price of cash transactions: [https://www.centralbank.ie/consumer- hub/rounding](https://www.centralbank.ie/consumer-hub/rounding)

Applying rounding was entirely voluntary, and all the Government did was gradually take the 1c and 2c coins out of circulation. After that, it was a matter of time for the problem to go away.

<comment><USER32> > if you're handling cash you still have to deal with 1c and 2c coins because > of that.

I don't think so. The same way you don't have to handle sub-1-penny tax amounts, you won't have to handle sub-nickle tax amounts later. There'll be some sort of rounding mechanism just like you described.

<comment><USER33> Well, yes. That's why I mentioned the rounding mechanism later. However, US- style sales taxes make the process of applying that more difficult because you can end up with weird numbers, whereas with VAT, you can pre-round things to minimise the disruption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I remember reading years ago that the reluctance to get rid of a penny is usual the unease in the central bank of a particular country to accept that the currency has inflated.

I imagine retailers would still price things at £9.95 instead to perpetuate the 'psychological trick' that "it's not really £10!".

<comment><USER35> They certainly have continued the $xxx9.99 tradition here in Canada.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I come from France, where we use pennies and live in the Netherlands where we don't.

It's always a great deal of fun seeing the family come over and try to hand over / or wait for their pennies after doing the groceries; struggling to really understand each other because of the language barrier.

There is something very charming about it .

<comment><USER37> You should be able to pay with 1 and 2 cent coins in The Netherlands. You just won't get them as change and the amount charged will be rounded to the nearest 5 cents in most, but not all, shops. But I wouldn't be surprised if many cashiers don't know they should accept those coins.

<comment><USER36> Interesting. I've tried in quite a few places and never got them accepted.

<comment><USER37> Here is the government website that says so and its translation (with a really long url, but the translation is better than that of Google Translate).

Appearantly every shop should have stickers telling customers that they round cash payments. I've never noticed that anywhere.

[https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/geldzaken/vraag- en-...](https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/geldzaken/vraag-en- antwoord/mogen-winkeliers-betalingen-afronden-op-0-eurocent-of-5-eurocent)

[https://www.deepl.com/translator#nl/en/%20Mogen%20winkeliers...](https://www.deepl.com/translator#nl/en/%20Mogen%20winkeliers%20betalingen%20afronden%20op%200%20eurocent%20of%205%20eurocent%3F%0A%0AWanneer%20u%20contant%20betaalt%2C%20mogen%20winkeliers%20in%20Nederland%20het%20totaalbedrag%20afronden%20op%200%20eurocent%20of%205%20eurocent.%20Zij%20moeten%20wel%20duidelijk%20aangeven%20met%20raamstickers%20of%20kassastickers%20dat%20ze%20de%20afrondingsregel%20toepassen.%0AAlleen%20afronden%20bij%20contante%20betalingen%0A%0AAfronden%20mag%20alleen%20wanneer%20u%20met%20contant%20geld%20betaalt.%20Met%20betaalmiddelen%20zoals%20een%20pinpas%20of%20een%20creditcard%20betaalt%20u%20het%20exacte%20bedrag.%0ARekenvoorbeeld%20afronden%20betalingen%0A%0AHet%20eindbedrag%20op%20de%20kassabon%20wordt%20bij%20contant%20betalen%20afgerond%20op%200%20cent%20of%205%20cent.%20Zo%20wordt%20%E2%82%AC%2023%2C37%20afgerond%20op%20%E2%82%AC%2023%2C35.%20En%20%E2%82%AC%208%2C89%20wordt%20%E2%82%AC%208%2C90.%0A1%20en%202%20eurocent%20blijven%20wettig%20betaalmiddel%0A%0ADe%20munten%20van%201%20en%202%20eurocent%20blijven%20een%20wettig%20betaalmiddel.%20U%20kunt%20met%20deze%20munten%20afrekenen.%20Heeft%20een%20winkelier%20vooraf%20duidelijk%20gemaakt%20dat%20hij%20afrondt%3F%20Dan%20hoeft%20hij%20geen%20munten%20van%201%20en%202%20eurocent%20wisselgeld%20te%20geven).

<comment><USER36> Geen vertaling nodig hoor :P. Thanks for the link! I can't say I have seen any of those stickers either. I'll have a more attentive look in the future

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> All I want is for all paper cash to be plastic so I can wash the covid off of it. I support getting rid of the penny, but I feel that plastic cash would make more of a difference.

CGP Grey has a wonderful video on the penny, he is my favorite YouTuber.

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y5UT04p5f7U](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=y5UT04p5f7U)

<comment><USER39> "Paper" cash is actually linen. You can wash it with hot water no problem

<comment><USER40> Everyone knows money laundering is against the law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm old enough to remember halfpenny coins here in the UK. I've got a few someplace that I kept.

When they were withdrawn in 1984, they were worth more than 1.5p in today's money. The country survived, so I dare say we could safely discontinue 1p (and 2p) coins.

<comment><USER42> I remember Polo mints going from 4.5p to 5p in ~1975. (I was 7 and such things were important...). It's curious that the minimum possible percentage increase then was 11%, but now, when Polo mints are around 60p, the minimum possible increase is 1.7%. Getting rid of all coins < 5p would return us to the same "granularity". (And possibly be inflationary.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Even as far back as the 90s I remember the PX on military bases rounding to the nearest nickel. Surprised more places don't do the same.

Ah apparently it's on overseas bases: [https://www.aafes.com/exchange- stores/faq/#11](https://www.aafes.com/exchange-stores/faq/#11)

</comment><comment><USER44> Yes, we don't need such small amounts of money. Just always round up, when paying and when giving the rest back.

> All those $9.99 products? The prices would be jacked up to an even $10!

Only logical thing, I know this "wow less than 10$" tricks people into buying stuff, but it's just stupid that it's the default to give me back 1 penny whatever I buy.

<comment><USER45> Actually, the pricing of individual items doesn't change. (Not least because of GST the price you pay at the till is not the sticker price.)

Where I live the 1c and 2c coins were killed some time ago. The smallest coin now is a 5c.

The way it works is that you go to the checkout, get a final total. If you pay cash then the change is "rounded up" to the nearest 5c mark. If you pay via card you pay the exact amount.

It's really not complicated, and frankly no-one cares about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I'd rather we do a reverse split of the dollar - say 10:1 - 10 old dollars = 1 new dollar, essentially take us back to 1950's pricing, coins become relevant again! + it has the added benefit of undoing all the changes in laws/refs that were not inflation adjusted. Not holding my breath...

<comment><USER47> If you think about it this way, it really does make a decent argument for switching larger denominations to coins.

Personally, I just use my debit card for everything and only use cash when the vendor specifically doesn't allow credit, which is increasingly rare with square and other methods of taking payment from a smartphone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Do it. In NZ, we got rid of everything below $0.10 and pretty much no one cares.

That said, a large portion of the country is cashless anyway. I almost never have cash on me.

<comment><USER49> And we started a long time ago. 1 and 2 cent coins were demonetised in 1990, $1 and $2 coins replaced notes in 1991, all notes were switched to tough washable polymer in 1999, 5 cent coins were dropped in 2006 (and most other coins were reduced in size at the same time). I also almost never use cash.

It's not like we have a low-value currency unit either (e.g. Yen). Prices in NZ dollars are usually less than double the US dollar price in the US (and our prices include sales tax and shipping to NZ).

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> Can we get rid of nickels and dimes too?

And standardize on a single sales tax rate across the country?

And then build that into prices instead of being tacked on extra?

Just let everything actually cost increments of $0.25. Let me buy something on the McDonald's dollar menu with an actual dollar. Not with two dollars and then dealing with _seven_ chunks of metal in return.

(I mean, as long as we're dreaming. Because if we haven't managed to get rid of the penny over the past 30 years, I don't see why we'll ever actually manage to in the future. Sadly.)

<comment><USER51> >standardize on a single sales tax rate across the country

My modest proposal, do what Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Oregon have all done and eliminate it. Sales tax is annoying and regressive.

<comment><USER52> I'll take sales tax over income tax; it's unconstutional in more than one way and an astounding waste of resources. RIP Aaron Russo.

<comment><USER53> > it's unconstutional in more than one way

There was an entire amendment specifically declaring the ability to levy (unapportioned) income tax. It was sufficiently passed, and overrides everything else that came before it.

You can't play a game of 'gotcha' and invalidate something like that off the way you want a word interpreted or some bureaucratic misstep.

<comment><USER52> Lets assume the 16th was ratified (it wasnt, but set that aside). One might ask the IRS Comissioner where the law is, plenty of IRS agents have tried: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNNeVu8wUak](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNNeVu8wUak)

It's also a rather obvious violation of the 5th. The gov does not own us; it's the other way around.

So far 9 states have removed state income tax completely: AL, TN, FL, NH, SD, WY, TX, WA, NE. A good start; seems to really bother the authortarians.

<comment><USER53> Where what law is? And something like this can't be undone by being clever. The intent of congress is for income tax to exist, and so it is enforced by the executive, under the supervision of the judiciary. That's all that really matters. And the case law is solid on how to interpret the rules.

The most that could happen is congress going 'oh, that was worded badly' and fixing the wording.

The 16th amendment cannot be in violation of the 5th. That's not how amending works.

Also doesn't that argument apply to all taxes? It seems pretty clear that blocking all taxes was not the intent, based on the rest of the constitution.

> A good start; seems to really bother the authortarians.

Really? I've never seen anyone bothered by that. Sounds fun to watch.

<comment><USER52> It's a good doc, check it out.

All taxes: no. Tarrifs for example are... excellent ethical and thoroughly constitutional.. Otherwise country X can just attack with slave labor.

Inalienable rights aren't called that because they can be overridden.

<comment><USER53> The gap between a sales tax and an income tax is not that big. It's not a human rights issue.

<comment><USER52> Why would the gap be relevant?

Perhaps we should ignore a small % of X Amendment claims? That would be a small gap right?

The Amendments dont confer rights to the people; they only remind the people of the things they gov has no power to do. See Amendment 0:

"THE Conventions of a number of the States, having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best ensure the beneficent ends of its institution."

[https://drexel.edu/ogcr/resources/constitution/amendments/pr...](https://drexel.edu/ogcr/resources/constitution/amendments/preamble/)

<comment><USER53> > Why would the gap be relevant?

Because I can at least understand an argument like "all taxation is theft".

When it's "sales tax is okay, but income tax violates innate rights", that's a pretty finicky argument. The difference barely matters.

<comment><USER52> Inalienable rights and differences in outcome are unrelated things, hence mentioning tariffs as protection by attack with slave labor. It's the primary job of a government to protect it's borders, physically and economically.

As that documentary nicely lays out, there is no constitutional law that anyone can point to on individual income tax. The IRS commissioner admits it.

Recent interview with former IRS agent: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXua-6xr_Kw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXua-6xr_Kw)

She asks in the beginning, "At what percentage is it not slavery?"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> The US penny is perhaps the most illustrative example of why I am wary that the US government can do ANYTHING efficiently.

The continued existence of the penny is absolutely ludicrous. Here we have something that has almost zero economic value to everyone involved. It costs more to mint them than they're worth. It likely costs more to even transport or count them than they're worth. It is almost entirely just economic drag on every transaction that involves them. Yet somehow, we can't find the political will to _just_ _stop_ _making_ them. Momentum truly is the most powerful force in politics.

It's sad, because it doesn't have to be this way. I am in favor of socialized health care. I could even be convinced that some amount of UBI may be a good idea. I am in favor of a strong social safety net. But the fact that this country can't even figure out how to stop making a coin that is worthless tells me that it is probably asking a little too much to expect that the federal government can competently manage anything as complex as healthcare or the livelihoods of millions.

<comment><USER55> > It costs more to mint them than they're worth.

Isn't this largely irrelevant since the producer of pennies makes up for this when they print any other form of currency?

> But the fact that this country can't even figure out how to stop making a > coin that is worthless tells me that it is probably asking a little too much > to expect that the federal government can competently manage anything as > complex as healthcare or the livelihoods of millions.

The worth of a unit of currency should not be measured by how much it costs to produce. If we're using that metric a $1 note has just as much worth as a $5 note, and a $20 note is equivalent to a $50 note. A single $50 pays for plenty of pennies in terms of cost.

I honestly don't know where I stand on keeping/removing the penny, but I do know from personal experience that counting and saving pennies was useful for me when I was very poor. I know that rounding down saves the consumer money, but putting the savings in a jar and treating yourself to something when you cash in your jar is _something_ of value that is lost.

I don't count pennies these days, but I used to, and I definitely picked up pennies off the street. Should we design economic/currency policy to 'help' the poor instead of actually helping the poor? Probably not, but I wince when I hear people say that pennies are worthless.

<comment><USER56> If we assume that it takes 2 seconds to pick up a penny, and you were to pick up pennies continuously, then you would be "earning" only $18 / hour.

<comment><USER55> Ok, but if I pick up pennies between my car and the grocery store the opportunity cost is basically nil, and then after a few months I'd have a non- trivial amount of cash.

<comment><USER56> If you picked up 10 pennies a day, you would only have $3 at the end of the month. Assuming you are not living in poverty, these sort of hyper-frugal behaviors are quite interesting to me from a psychological perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> There's a list of countries which have removed their smallest denomination coins on Wikipedia.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_rounding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cash_rounding)

<comment><USER58> For one political party in the US, the fact that other countries have done it is considered proof that it is an anti-American idea.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Go for it, America. We got rid of the penny up here in Canada in 2012. Doing so removed a degree of hassle from everyone's commercial lives.

</comment><comment> el-salvador My country uses the US Dollar as currency but since tax is added to prices we dont use pennies as much as in the US.

* Most prices are given in 5 cent multiples. * The pennies I get are usually from change in supermarkets or from produfts with _.99 prices_ Vending machine and parking machines don't accept pennies

I _do_ find the Dollar Coin annoying, which we use instead of the Dollar Bill. It's very easy to get lots of dollar coins as change.

I wish we used the $1 and $2 bill though. It would be very useful for the average transaction amount we have here. Our neighbouring countries all have bills near that amount.

(Minimum wage $1.78/h)

</comment><comment><USER59> I moved from a country that has pennies (Germany, so EUR cents) to one that doesn't (Switzerland, CHF) age 18.

The smallest coin is 0.05CHF. It's still worth enough that you might use a handful of them to make change for a small amount like, say, 0.40CHF.

Grocery prices either have a resolution of 0.05CHF (all major retailers) or if not, your bill will be rounded to a resolution 0.05CHF to the customers advantage (e.g. at Lidl).

I have never ever once missed the equivalent of the 1- or 2-cent EUR coin. They were a pain to have in your wallet, and an insult to any tip jar or piggy bank.

I have no rational idea why the concept hasn't caught on more widely.

<comment><USER60> I guess the question is... do you feel good about wasting one, two, three, and four?

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> There are billions more pennies lying in jars in people's houses than are in regular circulation. Even if we were to stop minting new pennies today we could coax the population to turn their pennies in and we wouldn't run out for centuries to come. There is no shortage of pennies. I don't care what Canada does, you're not going to take my pennies away.

<comment><USER62> A good way - a single day where each turned in penny gives you 3 "cents" in exchange. Of course you would be giving out only dollar or higher bills in such a program.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> I know this is about the US penny, but from a UK perspective I think it'd be much more useful to kill the two pence piece. Those coins are massive and, in my experience, never used except to put in those charity buckets. One pennies, however small their monetary value, at least help you make up odd prices, but twos are always just too much to make up a £2.47 bus fare.

<comment><USER64> Most likely both the 1p and 2p would go and prices would be rounded to the nearest 5p (so you wouldn't need a penny to make up the odd price). But the UK govt already said they're not doing this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> > By the 1990s, Kolbe says, he was introducing new legislation to kill the > penny with every new session of Congress. But he kept facing resistance — > for example, from the speaker of the House at the time, Dennis Hastert, who > represented a district in Illinois, the home state of Abraham Lincoln. > Lincoln, of course, is on the penny, and Kolbe says that proved to be a > major roadblock.

I hear this a lot, and I think its a weak argument. The original coinage act (1792?) authorized a $5 coin. Replace the Lincoln penny with the Lincoln $5 coin; you continue to have a Lincoln coin, you trade a useless coin for one that will be very useful for the next 100 years, and now all US currency with Lincoln on it is $5. Win-win-win.

</comment><comment><USER66> Honestly, I've wondered from time to time what effect (if any, clearly) penny's having an actual metallurgical value goes towards stemming inflation and creating not a "gold standard" but rather an accidental "copper and nickel standard"?

</comment><comment><USER67> It's really funny to talk about the government making or losing money when producing money ("seigniorage"). It really shows how money is just pretend numbers and the foundries can create or destroy it at will depending on the political winds (inflation being good for debtors and deflation being good for creditors). There's a reason the monied interests are against inflation of more than 2%, and it's because it would cause the debts logged as assets in their books to be worth less. Honestly, they would prefer deflation, but they were forced to accept some inflation as the cost of a growing economy.

</comment><comment><USER68> One time I was in Krogers and saw a man buying 6 onions with nickels, dimes, pennies. He took a long time but he bought his onions.

I personally don't care one way or another but those who miss the penny the most, won't likely get a voice.

<comment><USER69> I'm not sure I understand your point. Are you saying getting rid of the penny would hurt poor people?

<comment><USER68> Yeah pretty much. Most of the poor are unbanked and every penny counts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> My favored strategy would be be to put Harriet Tubman on the penny as the best path forward. This puts a wanted social change into the culture (Putting a black person on US currency) without removing any president from existing bills (Lincoln still stays on the $5) and erasing history. Additionally, the first black person on US currency should appear on a coin rather than paper money as they're harder to deface. Given the media situation in this country, I'm 100% sure the media will find or invent some disfigured paper bills with racist slurs to generate controversy and inflame racial tensions even further.

<comment><USER71> I've never understood the "erasing history" thing. Isn't the history the same? If I deface a penny, am I losing a certain quantity of history?

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> Early on in the current administration I half-joked that it'd all be worth if if at the end of it we (a) switched to ISO216, (b) bailed on Fahrenheit, and (c) ditched the penny.

Now _that_ would be a legacy any POTUS could be proud about.

</comment><comment><USER73> All coins are pretty terrible. When the US was trying to push those dollar coins, there was an argument that the government would make money by selling the new coins (through seigniorage), but that argument was counteracted by the fact that people just wouldn't use those coins and it would end up sitting in a jar somewhere rather than in a bank earning interest (the velocity of money would be reduced).

The government should put less money into designing and minting/printing new money and instead focus its resources on making the "unbanked" banked. Doing so through the post office has been talked about for years.

</comment><comment><USER74> There is a much simpler solution. Obviously people want their "0.01" coin, so we should instead envalue the currency. Cancel the dollar, make dollar2.0 which is exactly 10 times as valuable and done. You eliminate everything below 10cents effectively, the metal industry is happy to supply material for new coins, coin collectors are happy to get new coins, banks are delighted to make a bit of profit skimming a few dollars off people's accounts when converting their currency in their databases, everybody[1] wins!

[1] for some fraction of "everybody"

<comment><USER75> If you envalue by 100:1 you could probably start making silver dimes, quarters and dollars again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Australia dropped the copper 'penny' (one cent) along with its two-cent coin ages ago and nobody complained except for a few electronics people like me who used them as heat sinks for diodes and other electronic components. (Yuh simply drill a hole and solder them onto the wire leads of hot components.)

At exactly one cent each, they were much cheaper than their proper catalogue equivalents, we were left all adrift when our cheap source of coppers ran out.

So guys begin stocking up now while you've still the chance.

</comment><comment><USER77> I've actually found that I virtually never use cash anymore, virtually every place has a PoS now that accepts some kind of card of digital payment system. Heck, my favorite BBQ place which is run on weekends out of a vacant gravel lot uses square.

I also travel overseas a bit, and it's always strange to visit a country that's pretty cash heavy _Japan_ _cough_ _cough_. But even then we mostly get by with our credit cards.

</comment><comment><USER78> In Chile they have 1 peso pieces so small and light you can blow them from your hand like fairy dust.

The only stores that use them are big chains that operate on enormous economies of scale, e.g. Hiper Lider.

When backpacking there (on very little $) a homeless person asked me for some change. I dug into my pocket and offered him some change and he just lauuuughed at me.

Interestingly, $1 USD = ~800 Chilean pesos in 2020, but was over 2000 Chilean pesos in 2006.

</comment><comment><USER79> The Japanese 'penny' is (was?) made of aluminum. It looked less like currency and more like a token from a deluxe version of a board game. It was just too insubstantial.

As we've moved to zinc with a thinner and thinner copper jacket the US penny has drifted in that direction, but the relief is much more pronounced and makes it look more 'real'. Probably more expensive to make though.

<comment><USER80> a 1 yen coin has a mass of 1 gram - which can be handy for measuring stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Do not understand why we still mint them--there are enough pennies in existence to last forever, the problem is they are just sitting in jars on shelves. Instead of minting new ones the treasury (through banks) should just start buying them for 2 cents each until enough come back into circulation.

<comment><USER82> Lobbyists is the one and only answer. The zinc lobby is strong.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Wow that text only version is great, can I have that of every website please? (Without an ad-blocker)

</comment><comment><USER84> Kill every coin except the quarter.

</comment><comment><USER85> April 10, 2025 is when the penny should cease, so we can commemorate it on nickel/dime/quarter day 05/10/25\. And yes, it should be April 10 and not October 05 because this will be an American holiday dang it.

<comment><USER86> May...

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Go further. I haven't used coins in 10 years. Get coins - put them all in the 'penny tray'. Or give them to the cashier. Or hand them to somebody nearby. All else fails, toss them in the trash as I leave the store.

<comment><USER83> Trashing money is illegal and sounds very unethical to me.

<comment><USER88> Why unethical? You're giving everyone a small gift of deflation.

<comment><USER89> It's more ethical and efficient to burn paper money, if that's your goal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> One thing this Pandemic brought about is the importance of contactless payment. Exchanging cash is unhygenic. Signing credit card receipts is unhygienic. Doing away with pennies should just be a starter.

<comment><USER91> Replacing all money with copper-coated currency like pennies would probably be more hygienic, considering copper is one of the most effective anti-microbial things out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> Seems to me it mostly doesn't matter if 95-99% of all transactions go digital. So basically it's less work to do nothing about the penny because the issue will solve itself.

</comment><comment><USER93> The first time I read a proposal like this I thought it was a terrible idea, but the penny has lost more than half its value since then. I'm much more sympathetic now.

</comment><comment><USER94> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tyszHg96KI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tyszHg96KI)

</comment><comment><USER95> And the nickel, and the dime... and maybe the quarter

<comment><USER96> So the minimum you can pay for something is $0.50?

That kind of stinks... individual fruits and other produce currently cost less than $0.50. I think $0.10 should be the minimum because then you can just drop the hundredths digit and prices will be, i.e. "$3.2", "$99.9", etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER97> I'd like this dumb trend to price things with #.99 to go away. It's so annoying. May be dropping pennies will help that.

</comment><comment><USER98> No, coin collectors have enough problems as it is

</comment><comment><USER99> It was time to kill the penny years ago. Australia got rid of one and two cent coins in 1992 and nobody missed them.

</comment><comment><USER100> The only coins we need are dimes. Round cash transactions to the nearest $0.1. Make everyone's lives simpler.

</comment><comment><USER101> But then how would we make souvenir flattened pennies for .26 at tourist traps?

Seriously, I haven't used cash in so many years that I literally can't remember the last time I touched paper money or coins. Maybe 15 years ago? As far as I'm concerned, we've already transitioned to a 100% digital economy and there is no longer a need for analog money.

<comment><USER60> The US Mints could just sell blanks to the tourist traps and they in turn could raise the price to $1.

I use cash all the time. I like to round out my errands with a beer at a brewery before biking home. Hand the server a $5 bill when I get the beer, so fast also a strong tip on the cheapest beers. I'm also forced to use cash when I purchase my medical marijuana. I drink Americanos when I purchase a coffee, $2 or $2.25 is pretty reasonable but I sometimes can get the exact change for a place charging $2.15.

I think digital and physical money has it's uses and I will use cash in my wallet first because any phone or credit card solution is slower.

<comment><USER102> > I think digital and physical money has it's uses and I will use cash in my > wallet first because any phone or credit card solution is slower.

Surprised you've had that experience, I've always found waiting for the cashier to make change to be a long and arduous process, while I can simply tap my watch on the reader or insert my card and move along with my day. Not to mention that I have no interest in carting around a pocket full of coin change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> I guess it's easier to kill the penny than to divide all prices by a factor of 2.

</comment><comment><USER104> I'd rather see us move away from physical money altogether.

</comment><comment><USER105> Pennies are just extra surfaces for coronavirus to ride on.

</comment><comment><USER106> why not rebase the currency /100?

two upsides:

* we can do counting on our fingers again for shopping

* large numbers of C-list celebreties are no longer millionaires

</comment><comment><USER107> Yes, please do it. They are just a hassle.

</comment><comment><USER108> Yes. Let's kill the nickel too!

</comment><comment><USER109> Yes you are right agreed with you

</comment><comment><USER110> Why kill it?

Why not just re-value it instead?

For example, make its value $1000.

Would maybe be a neat solution to the 1% problem.

<comment><USER111> > Why not just re-value it instead?

> For example, make its value $1000.

The US used to have $1000 bills (and $10,000 bills, but those were only for internal gov't use). I'm pretty sure we're stuck with $100 as the top denomination to make organized crime more difficult.

Also, it's WAY easier to counterfeit a coin than a bill.

<comment><USER112> Singapore & Brunei (1) had a $10000 bill until 2014 (worth ~7400 USD), and still have a $1000 bill (as does Switzerland with its better exchange rate)

(1) I don't know what the word is (linked?) but their currency is interchangeable. You can go to a Singapore bank with $100 BND and get $100 SGD (no fee) and vice versa.

<comment><USER111> > I don't know what the word is (linked?) but their currency is > interchangeable. You can go to a Singapore bank with $100 BND and get $100 > SGD (no fee) and vice versa.

I believe the term is "pegged"[1], although what you describe sounds like it is much more involved.

___

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_exchange_rate_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_exchange_rate_system)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER113> The nickel then becomes the new penny.

This propaganda is part of the inflationary process, which is intended to increase economic velocity at or faster than the rate of savings, at the expense of savings.

Soon, a dollar will be thought of the way we think of a quarter, and the quarter will become the new dime. Decent family homes will cost north of $2.5MM, and people will say, "back when I was a kid...".

<comment><USER60> This comment is at the very bottom of the comments right now and I'm glad I looked for it.

I agree by killing the penny we essentially force inflation to happen. Bread priced at $.99 can be sold at $.98 far more easily than bread priced $1 can be sold at $.95. By removing the penny our jumps become more volatile. Something increasing in cost by a penny or two might take a product from 99¢ to $1 or reduce the profit margin a bit now, but when there is no penny the $1 product that needs to cost 2¢ more is going to cost $1.05.

</comment></comment><comment><USER114> We shouldn't kill the penny because it is a reminder that our currency has been inflated and is no longer worth a small fraction of what it once was. Never forget that pre-1965 coinage besides the penny was made of 90 percent silver. A face value of 1.40 in pre-1965 dimes and quarters is worth 20.00 today, the fact that a penny, not even made of copper, is too expensive to make should be concerning.

<comment><USER115> (1) Inflation doesn't matter if you're not hoarding cash. By and large, real estate tracks inflation across the United States. Stock indices exceed inflation. Inflation doesn't matter to you if you aren't holding cash.

(2) It doesn't matter how we got here, we're here, and it's useless.

<comment><USER114> You are of course correct until Exters pyramid collapses which becomes more and more a distinct possibility as the currency is debased.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: My weekend project - Password Manager - <AUTHOR>

I needed a very simple password keeper for Android, and this what I came up with:
https://market.android.com/details?id=com.mypassmanager&hl=en
The design is a theme I bought for $70, and all code is written from scratch since Saturday morning. I would really appreciate some feedback from the HN community, about how to make the app better. I'm sure we all can learn a lot from this
Thanks! <comment> Tim-Boss Opensource it?</comment>


Rupert Murdoch threatened Mark Zuckerberg in 2016 with a war over Facebook (2016 - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/12/facebook-rupert-murdoch-threatened-mark-zuckerberg-in-2016-with-a-war.html <comment><USER2> that can be a good reason why the media reports so much on FB and so little on Google, when they are exactly the same.</comment>


OkCupid Study Reveals the Perils of Big-Data Science - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2016/05/okcupid-study-reveals-perils-big-data-science/ <comment><USER2> My first instinct in this case is to agree that the data is public, or at the very least, protected by account login and therefore only legally protected by the OkCupid terms of use. I see no possible legal argument against the methods of data collection, unless OkCupid wants to sue the researcher for breaching terms of use. Or, perhaps, users could sue OkCupid for failing to diligently protect their data.

That said, this was an Academic study, presumably funded at least in part by the University, and therefore subject to approval from an Institutional Review Board (IRB) [0]. Granted it was not an American university, so perhaps no IRB exists. And it was a small study by a group of graduate students, which seems unlikely to be subject to as much scrutiny as a study officially funded and endorsed by the university. However, this is no excuse for circumventing research ethics. To quote the wiki article, "a key goal of IRBs is to protect human subjects from physical or psychological harm," which implies that moral arguments should hold at least as much weight as legal arguments when considering the potential impact of a study.

It's entirely possible for a study to be legal, but immoral. Since this study came from a university, any moral argument should be as valid as a legal one. The trouble seems to be that nobody heard any argument, moral or legal, before approving the study.

In this case, the failure seems to lie with the Danish University, who allowed its graduate students to conduct a study without consultation from an IRB or any kind of ethical oversight committee.

Interestingly, the data _is_ "public," in the sense that anyone could replicate this study with some Python and OkCupid accounts. So even if researchers are stopped by an IRB from collecting the data, that doesn't mean another entity can't do the exact same study, free from any procedural impediments. So it makes you wonder about the premise of questioning the study in the first place. Perhaps a better use of this soapbox, instead of lambasting the researchers, would be to raise awareness of the fact that _what you put onto the Internet is public._

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board)

<comment><USER3> > Perhaps a better use of this soapbox, instead of lambasting the researchers, > would be to raise awareness of the fact that _what you put onto the Internet > is public._

That is maybe not the best lesson to take from this.

The problem seems to be that people want to create a binary distinction between "public" (meaning public domain, can be used for anything by anyone) and "private" (meaning something known solely to a single individual), with no intermediary steps between them.

But profile data like this is something that lives in the space in between. You're clearly intending to share it with people in a particular category (other similarly-situated users) but not _everyone_ and not _forever_. It's the sort of data you expect not to be archived; if you delete your account then it should go away.

That is not how the laws of physics work. If you allow the data to be seen by other users and anyone can sign up to be another user then anyone can see the data and anyone can copy it. But that is why we have social norms. That is why finding the online dating profile of everyone who works at the same company as you and then mass mailing it to everyone in the office is not considered friendly behavior.

And probably what companies that run sites like this should be doing is adopting a robots.txt that disallows crawling of user profiles and then rate limiting to some maximum number of profile views (e.g. 10,000/month) that no real user would ever hit but would provide a good hint to data hoovering operations that they aren't wanted here.

<comment><USER4> >a robots.txt that disallows crawling of user profiles

It's a voluntary mechanism and convention that requests that pages not be crawled, which is somewhat different from what you wrote. (Which isn't to say that it shouldn't be used buy AFAIK it has no legal significance.)

<comment><USER5> It's intended as a way to help robots crawl a site. If you have a robot that doesn't need help it _should_ ignore the file.

Because so many people misunderstand it, robots.txt is often a list of what you should crawl to find the good stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really do not understand this argument or belief people have, that they can send out their information into the world, via a network of unknown intermediaries to a private third party in another country, and somehow their data is still "private". That your data is posted for everybody to see on a publicly accessible website, and somehow your data is still "private".

Here's something incredibly simple: if you don't want your data to be public, then don't share it! Don't transmit it! Don't want the other users on OkCupid storing your information? Why did you put it there in the first place!?!? The internet is not now, nor was it ever, a private place.

These guys did nothing wrong as far as I'm concerned, besides maybe breaching OkCupid's TOS. OkCupid can sue if it pleases them, but that's a matter for civil law.

<comment><USER7> If I'm out chatting with friends about my life and I'm in public then I may have no real expectation of privacy, but that doesn't mean I won't be upset if someone decides to follow me around with a spotlight shouting about everything I'm saying

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Meta: did something change in Wired's policy? Because I can read the article with an ad blocker turned on. Googling for recent articles about it, I don't see anything.

Edit: Never mind, I can scroll all the way through and I can see the whole article. But if I read from the top and then scroll, it blocks me. So they give me a chance to see "oh it's all there," start reading, and then block it for me. Talking about dark patterns... I mean, I get it from a financial standpoint, and I'm totally going to circumvent this blocking now (private window, inspect element, I don't know what'll work yet), but it's just shitty.

<comment><USER9> Firefox' Reader mode seems to bypass this nonsense in one click.

<comment><USER10> And bypasses Flash and page jumps as javascript and advertisements load. Particularly late loading hero ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you follow the links to get to the dataset (for instance to see if you're in it), you arrive here[1], which says

      Unavailable For Legal Reasons
      This record has been suspended

[1] [https://osf.io/p9ixw/](https://osf.io/p9ixw/)

<comment><USER12> Yes, because the guy has already started feeling the heat.

<comment><USER13> Another article said OKC did file a legitimate takedown with the data repository host, and they complied.

<comment><USER14> "legitimate"? Is UGC copyrighted by the platform host?

<comment><USER15> It's most likely licensed by the user to the host (through a ToS), and the host has the ability to use that license to submit takedown notices of their collective database (which is how US copyright law works).

Good!

<comment><USER16> > use that license to submit takedown notices of their collective database > (which is how US copyright law works) //

It would be contract law based on the click-wrap/T&Cs of the website wouldn't it? Copyright doesn't cover facts, only their arrangement; ergo as long as he didn't copy the way the content had been presented he would apparently be clear of copyright infringement.

In Europe we have database rights law too, is there an equivalent in the USA?

<comment><USER15> I don't believe user profiles are going to be considered facts, but creative works. OKCupid's corpus as a whole would be protected as a database, but the individual profiles would not be considered facts.

<comment><USER16> The individual fields describing the character of the users are surely factual type data, even if fictional they don't amount to creative works. A mugshot (face image) is not likely to be considered sufficiently creative to amount to a work of itself, and that's the most creative component of a persons profile.

<comment><USER15> Your opinion and a court's opinion are substantially different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> In the grand scheme of things this is good news. People need to realise they can't trust random websites with their deepest secrets.

There is no reason to think no one is scraping dating websites, social medias and other "public" personal data for personal profit. For blackmailing, social engineering...

The sooner people will get this chilling feel that "wait, what I post online may actually come back to bite me" the better.

</comment><comment><USER18> This article begs the question. _Why_ does "Public not equal consent"?

<comment><USER19> "Consent" is an agreement by two or more parties on some specific subject, preferably when all parties are properly informed about the subject.

Putting your dating profile on a dating site, with preferences for matches, means explicitly "I want these specific people to look at my dating profile - FOR DATING". That is the obvious purpose of the site and the profile, and the "preferred matches" only reinforce that, not to mention the internal filters OkC allows you to use to block people who don't match a certain %.

There is not any explicit purpose or intent that says "I want this personal information to be used by researchers in a large group study". There was no explicit agreement between the user and these researchers. Hence, no consent.

However. The question then becomes, "Do they _need_ consent?"

The answer is: Check the Terms Of Service on the website. If the website explicitly forbids using the data for research purposes, they can probably be sued by the website for breach of TOS. If the TOS does not explicitly prohibit research use, then no, they don't need consent.

Oh - and if it wasn't already obvious, the users don't own the data, so they have no say in how it is used.

<comment><USER20> > the users don't own the data, so they have no say in how it is used.

That statement requires proof, preferably in form of recent case law.

In either case, the TOS states: "You further agree that you will not use personal information about other users of this Website for any reason without the express prior consent of the user that has provided such information to you."

<comment><USER19> > That statement requires proof, preferably in form of recent case law.

Uh, i'm pretty sure the company collected and possesses the data. It's on their hard drives and they allow you to view it by connecting to their servers using their software. A user, as an outside party, has no claim to someone else's property. (But you're right, IANAL, so maybe there's some freaky justification for being able to tell someone else what they can do with their own data on their own servers?)

Well the TOS seems to spell it out! Unfortunately, as it is [probably] the company's property, it is probably the company that would have to issue any lawsuit. Then it's up to the courts to judge whatever legal argument is made.

<comment><USER20> If the data is generated by or concerns the users, then they have ownership (degree varying on jurisdiction).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> So. I read the whole thing. And they cite several precedents. But what _are_ the perils? They never say.

</comment><comment><USER22> This guy better seek legal assistance quickly. EU data protection legislation is strict, and data about sexual orientation etc. falls under particularly strict protections. The combination of lack of consent and publishing personally identifiable information in a different context, by a different entity of the one that collected it, has plenty of potential for legal challenges that could get rather expensive for him, and I think his glib comment about how the data is already public won't get him very far in court - EU data protection law takes context and what the subject of the information has given consent to very seriously.

</comment><comment><USER23> _When asked whether the researchers attempted to anonymize the dataset, Aarhus University graduate student Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, who was lead on the work, replied bluntly: "No. Data is already public."_

The guy seems completely unrepentant to even the _idea_ that he might be violating people's privacy.

<comment><USER24> Worse still, it seems likely that they were using data that wasn't actually public:

 _Their paper reveals that initially they designed a bot to scrape profile data, but that this first method was dropped because it was "a decidedly non- random approach to find users to scrape because it selected users that were suggested to the profile the bot was using." This implies that the researchers created an OkCupid profile from which to access the data and run the scraping bot. Since OkCupid users have the option to restrict the visibility of their profiles to logged-in users only, it is likely the researchers collected—and subsequently released—profiles that were intended to not be publicly viewable._

<comment><USER23> Oh, I'm _quite sure_ it wasn't public. I had an OkCupid profile at one time (thankfully deleted, and even then it had no identifying details and was linked to a dummy email), and the only reason I agreed to sign up was the site's assurance that absolutely NOTHING was publicly visible unless you had a profile.

So, yeah, at the risk of breaking my attempted objectivity, I'd be personally thrilled if the guy got sued.

<comment><USER25> It seems to me that the problem here is that you were assured that things weren't public. In that sense, I would say that OKCupid should be sued.

I mean, sure, academics might get stopped by lawsuits. Russian social engineering hackers won't though.

<comment><USER17> From [https://www.okcupid.com/legal/terms](https://www.okcupid.com/legal/terms):

"You should appreciate that all information submitted on the Website might potentially be publicly accessible. Important and private information should be protected by you. We are not responsible for protecting, nor are we liable for failing to protect, the privacy of electronic mail or other information transferred through the Internet or any other network that you may utilize."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I get that this isn't "socially acceptable" and that it requires an account to access (accounts which can be created by the general public). But every time I think about it I fall back to the conclusion that if they didn't release it it would be fairly easy to collect anyways. So yes, this release made it easier, but at some level I see that as a good thing to make people aware of.

I see why this got so much discussion, it's a very grey area from my point of view.

</comment><comment><USER14> Article doesn't mention OKC ToS one way or the other. What are the ToS?

Most sites ban content scraping by users (And good sites have technical countermeasures)

</comment><comment><USER27> 70,000 users is now big data....?

</comment><comment><USER28> Here's a thing I wrote on my personal FB wall as I linked to this article.

####

Some creepy Danish assholes went ahead and released a full dataset on 70.000 random users of the OkCupid dating service "because data science".

After being confronted about the questionable ethics of this stunt, lead researcher Emil O. W. Kirkegaard refuses interviews, stating that the data was already public. Kirkegaard also implies that opponents of his methods are "social justice warriors", an oftentimes euphemistic term for people interested in things like gender and minority rights issues. Interestingly, this term is repeated and specified as an area explicitly excluded from Kirkegaard's interest in "civil liberties" on his personal website.

In addition to "civil liberties", the personal website of this "26 year old polymath wannabe" (read: fuckwit neckbeard) lists interests such as online privacy and the Pirate Party. That's right, you can't make this shit up: [http://emilkirkegaard.dk](http://emilkirkegaard.dk)

These people simply don't care that the "public" information posted on a dating site may cost certain people their jobs, families or even their lives, at any point in the future. Open source intelligence like this may be used to extort people at a later date or lower the threshold for invisible discrimination everywhere from the job market to insurance claims.

Perhaps all this seems irrelevant to Kirkegaard, as his self-defined interest in liberty explicitly excludes those most vulnerable to such structures.

The rest of us could do worse than to remember what is going on and question how informed our consent really is: By default, everything you do on the mainstream internet is recorded. Private browser modes don't really help to protect you and neither do VPNs. Practically everything you typically do leaks information that can be connected back to you. For a demo, see [https://panopticlick.eff.org](https://panopticlick.eff.org).

And oh, dating sites don't exclude sharing your dating related personal info with interested third parties ( [https://www.abine.com/blog/2012/privacy-on- okcupid/](https://www.abine.com/blog/2012/privacy-on-okcupid/) ). But hey, you probably don't live with one foot in the closet concerning any aspect of your life you may have hinted at in a dating profile or its chat service. Right?

This time, professional stalkers in imaginary data science lab coats just happened to unmask a bunch of information. The wilful cluelessness apparent in this case is even worse than in the decade-old case there AOL released a bunch of poorly anonymised data on search habits: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak)

Normally, interested parties would have to pay a bunch of money for datasets from data brokers or ad/analytics companies and perform a varying degree of computation to unmask and correlate some of the personally identifiable from different sources. That sounds like work, but it's of course increasingly possible to automate.

So, take a step back and realize that the only thing protecting you from an existence in something way worse than the oversight of Stasi, the KGB or Securitate, is the thin veil of aging and increasingly inefficient legal protections we happen to have in many western democracies.

Parties interested in exploring the utter and complete exploitation of your most intimate information sometimes do so with a holier-than-thou aura of privacy mindedness and selective personal liberty politics. All while personally getting their filthy little hands ever dirtier when the power is at their fingertips.

####

<comment><USER29> > an oftentimes euphemistic term for people interested in things like gender > and minority rights issues.

I wouldn't call it euphemistic. It's willful dismissiveness. And I'd posit that the Venn diagram intersection of users of the term and Ayn Rand super fans is large.

<comment><USER30> I don't understand why it's necessary to make this political. What these guys did is wrong, I see no need to paint those have similar politics with same brush as this person.

<comment><USER29> The social justice warrior part was brought up by the grad student in question. I'd argue that it was he who attempted to turn an isolated act of bad judgement into a political statement. I am, in response, stating that people who think in terms of labeling others as social justice warriors tend to have shitty politics.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


A basic guide to when and how to deploy HTTPS - <AUTHOR> http://erik.io/blog/2013/06/08/a-basic-guide-to-when-and-how-to-deploy-https/ <comment><USER2> If you want another reason for enabling HTTPS, even for shitty blogs - on one of my visits to the US, I stayed at a motel that was snooping on my Wifi traffic, injecting their own ads in Google's searches and displaying their own banners in the websites I was visiting.

If you're the owner of a Wifi network, there are already available solutions for monetizing users' traffic, by injecting ads, like this one: [http://rgnets.com/](http://rgnets.com/)

So you, as the publisher of a shitty blog or website, do you really want ISPs, motels or any other third-party to mess with your own content, to inject their own scripts and frames in your HTML, to degrade the experience for your readership?

One easy way of fixing that is HTTPS. HTTPS is not just for security or privacy, it's also for digitally signing the content that's being served.

<comment><USER3> Https doesn't stop them, mitm solves the problem for them. I'm sure you have already seen it, if you travel a lot.

It's bad idea to redirect http to https. It's much better to drop http support completely. Redirection weakens security.

<comment><USER4> This is why we have HSTS.

<comment><USER3> And secure cookies, yes. But as we have seen, those things simply do not work out. As the usual layered security approach, it's good idea not to provide HTTP service at all, so redirection isn't hiding failures to use HTTPS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's a good beginners guide. To take it a step further, check out the documentation that we maintain at Mozilla: [https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS)

<comment><USER6> Also check out the "Quick Wins for Better Website Security" talk that Dan Callahan (hey, I wonder where he works) at PyCon Canada.

[https://speakerdeck.com/pyconca/quick-wins-for-better- websit...](https://speakerdeck.com/pyconca/quick-wins-for-better-website- security-dan-callahan)

<comment><USER7> Hah! Thanks! I'll also be giving an updated version of that talk at PyCon in Montreal this April. :)

There's a video of the PyCon Canada talk here: [http://pyvideo.org/video/2315/quick-wins-for-better- website-...](http://pyvideo.org/video/2315/quick-wins-for-better-website- security)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Q: When to deploy https?

A: Always.

<comment><USER9> For big sites, sure. But at least as things currently stand, that's infrastructure-inconvenient and somewhat pricey on the low end, especially if you operate multiple sites and they come and go as hobby projects. Not because of the compute overhead (negligible for my uses), but because of the need for a (non-self-signed) SSL certificate, plus a unique IPv4 address, for each domain. Digital Ocean, for example, won't give you more than 1 IPv4 address per VPS, which means you need a separate VPS for every side project, if you want to go HTTPS. I prefer to multiplex all my tiny projects on one VPS, saving both the extra $60/yr per project and the extra sysadmin overhead. Plus $50/yr for the certificate, and $15 for the domain, and you have a startup cost of $125/yr per side project... versus $15/yr that it currently costs me. Not huge, but more than I want to pay, and raises the mental friction on something that I currently consider near-free/throw-away.

If IPv6 actually gets deployed to the extent that I can have an IPv6-only site without needing IPv4 addresses, and someone solves the SSL signing mess, I'd be happy to use it.

<comment><USER10> > Plus $50/yr for the certificate

This is certainly no longer true. $7 for a cert from Namecheap (domain validated).

<comment><USER11> Just had a look at namecheap, can anyone explain the main reason to forgo the PositiveSSL option ($7/annum) and take out their more expensive option; EssentialSSL ($21/annum).

<comment><USER10> You get a "site seal" with EssentialSSL. Both are equivalent on a technical level, so go with PositiveSSL unless your users care about SSL branding (most don't).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The biggest barrier to HTTPS is the fact that it's a royal pain in the ass for someone who's not an OPs guy to set up. Unless you're on a shared host or some sort of PaaS that sets your certificates up for you, it's basically a big "go fuck yourself" to get everything installed and configured properly.

Even the Mozilla article linked in the top comment asks you to choose a ciphersuite. Who the heck has time to know and understand what to use, and then figure out how to make it work on their own server?

Oh, the version of Apache you're running combined with the version of OpenSSL that comes pre-installed on your Linux distro causes "Re-negotiate handshake failed" errors? Good luck finding the answer to that on StackExchange.

For most folks that are just trying to ship something, unless security is a huge issue HTTPS doesn't come first because it's simply too much work. And if HTTP works out of the box, there's little incentive to turn on HTTPS.

<comment><USER13> I was able to get basic SSL working with basically no effort just by Googling around for 'SSL nginx'; the Mozilla article doesn't tell you to choose a ciphersuite, it tells you 'use this one unless you know what you're doing'. And then if you scroll down it gives you some configuration directives you can just copy-paste into your browser config file.

I'm not even an ops guy and I was able to get it working for my (granted, fairly simple) site without any pain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have dozens of unique domain names to secure and growing. The cost of buying an individual cert for each one is prohibitive. What can be done instead?

<comment><USER15> No it's not, it's literally $0. [https://startssl.com/?app=1](https://startssl.com/?app=1)

<comment><USER16> I recently tried the free startssl cert.

Fine on IOS/OSX/W7 Chrome/Safari/Firefox/IE but it was rejected by Android default browser where startssl must not be a known CA.

I don't think I can do without Android.

<comment><USER17> Either you misconfigured it or you tested using Android <2.1[1] which accounts for less than 1% Android users.

[https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=21632](https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=21632)

<comment><USER16> Thanks for the link, it helped me get there. I followed the documentation and tutorials for nodejs/express which defined the cert and key. As your link suggested, mobile browsers are less lenient about missing intermediate ca information so adding this solved it:

        var express = require('express'),
            path = require('path'),
            http = require('http'),
            https = require('https'),
            fs = require ('fs');

        var app = express();

        var options = {
          key: fs.readFileSync('cert/rsa.key'),
          cert: fs.readFileSync('cert/rsa.crt'),
          ca: fs.readFileSync('cert/sub.class1.server.ca.pem') // needed this
        };

        https.createServer(options, app).listen(443);

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Alot of ecommerce sites (Amazon, Flipkart) seem to use HTTP over HTTPS. Even when you're logged in. These sessions can easily be hijacked. I assume this is because of the handshake latency of HTTPS. Is there no way around this latency to make your website feel faster? I imagine there isnt, because even amazon uses HTTP.

<comment><USER19> amazon uses https for any important/sensitive pages. there's two sessions, one for http, one for https.

<comment><USER18> Can you explain more on how two sessions would work? I mean if the hijacker hijacks the http session he can convert it to https by following the same steps the user does. Since amazon does not ask the user to reauthenticate on https pages.

<comment><USER20> You can set the secure flag when creating a cookie which will only send it over an HTTPS connection.

It is possible to use both schemes, but it is likely better to stick to all SSL if possible in case of developer error causing something to get exposed when it shouldn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anyone know of a good ACTUAL guide for deploying HTTPS? i.e. ins and outs of different certificate types, configuring on popular backends, etc?

I always have to stumble through this painfully every time it comes up again.

<comment><USER22> you are pathetic

<comment><USER21> Because I don't enjoy SSL configuration?

<comment><USER14> "im_a_lawyer" is a little weird/poisonous. Ignore him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Most eCommerce sites do not deploy SSL site-wide, but only on login and checkout actions. Look at Amazon, Wayfair, etc. Depending on how the site was coded, you can mitigate session hijacking over HTTP. I'd love to see examples of Amazon session hijacking because product browse pages are simply over HTTP, I think you'll find that it's not possible to hijack those sessions.

<comment><USER18> I've noticed this too. Alot of ecommerce sites use HTTP for browsing. I assume this is because of speed. However I dont see why the session cannot be hijacked? If i copy all of the cookies how will the server differentiate the hijacker from the user. They both have the same cookies.

<comment><USER24> I think you just need one HTTPS only cookie (Amazon seems to have two) and just check that one (in addition to the others) at purchase time, since that one can't be stolen.

However, the sign in button is served from a insecure page, so a ISP could MITM that and get your password anyway.

<comment><USER23> it's easier to just hijack DNS anyways

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What about a CMS for, say, a blog? You want the administration console to be protected with https, but what about the main pages? Could I make admin.mydomain.com (and have the admin console on that) https only and my domain.com http?

I don't want to buy a cert for the site, but I'd be happy to create a self- signed cert for all the people who can access the admin.

<comment><USER25> IANASE, but that should work, so long as you're diligent about keeping everything that requires a login quarantined to a separate subdomain. Once you leak a cookie over to the public side, it's over.

<comment><USER26> It doesn't have to be on a separate subdomain -- setting a secure flag should provide sufficient protection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm a little surprised such a basic article has made it to frontpage of HN, and especially considering a number of omissions - such as that Cookies should be marked with a 'secure' flag when using HTTPS, or that weak ciphers should be explicitly disabled.

There's no "we're ok, I switched security to ON" in the security world

<comment><USER7> Did we read the same article? The `secure` flag is the fifth of the "Key Points" at the top of the article, and the entire penultimate section is devoted to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Does anyone know if it would be completely save to have a site (blog) with the public part on [http://](http://) on one domain (f.e. aa.com), and the administration part on [https://](https://) on another domain (f.e. bb.com)?

</comment><comment><USER29> Don't forget to disable TLS compression and HTTP compression for pages containing session ids or CSRF tokens.

Basically you need a cookie-less HTTPS subdomain for your static media, and a www.example.com HTTPS domain for your content.

<comment><USER30> > Don't forget to disable TLS compression and HTTP compression for pages > containing session ids or CSRF tokens.

Dumb question: Is this general advice or is it specific to django due to the "BREACH" [1][2] https attack? It's not clear if it the underlying flaw is in using a CSRF token or something specific to django's implementation. I had never heard this before, so thank you.

[1] [http://news.softpedia.com/news/Django-BREACH-Attack- Against-...](http://news.softpedia.com/news/Django-BREACH-Attack-Against- HTTPS-Can-Be-Used-to-Compromise-CSRF-Protection-373647.shtml) [2] [http://stacks.11craft.com/what-is-breach-how-can-we- protect-...](http://stacks.11craft.com/what-is-breach-how-can-we-protect- django-projects-against-it.html)

<comment><USER29> General. Don't use TLS compression or HTTP compression for any information you want to keep secret. BREACH and CRIME attacks exploit this.

You can still use, say, HTML minification.

You can compress your js and css as long as you make sure you aren't sending your confidential information in those request/response headers. A good way to do this is to setup a subdomain for media that never uses cookies.

<comment><USER30> Thanks. We've been segregating authenticated vs non-authenticated traffic to different domains for a few years now (we had the same realization as moot), but I was unaware about this specific exploit related to _TLS_ compression.

That said, it seems on nginx TLS compression was not enabled by default, so we are ok (for this known vulnerability).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think there is absolutely no reason to _NOT_ deploy HTTPS.

</comment><comment><USER32> It would be better to define HTTPS by default, and plain HTTP for exceptional cases. I would use HTTP only for strictly public and eternally cacheable big files.

</comment><comment><USER33> Should internal communication also be HTTPS? Even if they are sitting behind your powerful firewall, should they be HTTPS with some valid certs?

</comment><comment><USER34> When? Always.

</comment><comment><USER35> when=always

</comment><comment><USER36> side question: how do you make your blog entry like the Medium.com style? It's very easy to read this blog.

</comment><comment><USER37> Useful tips here.</comment>


Open Offices Make You Less Open - <AUTHOR> http://calnewport.com/blog/2018/07/06/open-offices-make-you-less-open/ <comment><USER2> "In the 15 days before the office redesign, participants accumulated an average of around 5.8 hours of face-to-face interaction per person per day. After the switch to the open layout, the same participants dropped to around 1.7 hours of face-to-face interaction per day."

Maybe it's because what used to take 3 hour meetings to settle, now took 3 minutes of talking with the guy next to you?

"productivity, as defined by the metrics used by their internal performance management system, had declined after the redesign to eliminate spatial boundaries.""

Maybe their metrics are wrong? Maybe they measured lines of code written, and maybe they used to do busywork writing lines of code that weren't really needed, and now they're actually able to get things done? They don't say anything about their metrics and expect us to trust that they were just less productive.

<comment><USER3> 5.8 hours of face to face interaction.

How did these people get -anything- done? They spent 3/4s of their day in meetings.

After the switch, they spent 1/4 of their day in meetings.

WTF? I'm sorry, but how the heck did the adoption of an open office lead to people getting half their day back?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> All my life, I've done my programming work either alone at home, in the silence of a library or with a small team in a quiet room. I consider that open offices are a bane to my productivity. I honestly cannot focus without headphones on. However, you have to keep an ear open at all time in order for the benefits of such an office.

I often do unpaid overtime simply to have time alone and I consider that during those times my productivity triples.

All open office plans should offer quiet private areas for employees where they could go and focus on complicated issues. Sadly, I have yet to see anyone offer it (except maybe the big names like Google and Amazon).

<comment><USER5> After they switched us to an open office there was so much complaining that they then bought noise-cancelling headphones for everyone. So now we have an open office in which everyone wears headphones in an attempt to emulate having some privacy.

From my perspective it's the worst of most worlds, but they did manage to cram a lot more people into the space so it does save on building/office costs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Open offices are cheaper, and they look a lot cooler than a bunch of hallways and closed doors (and certainly cooler than cubicles). They're gonna be hard to get rid of.</comment>


MI5 joins social messaging trawl for riot organisers - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/15/mi5-social-messaging-riot-organisers-police/print

<comment><USER2> Are BBM messages "PIN protected" as the article claims, or is the BBM PIN merely an addressing mechanism? It's not the first time the Guardian has used the term "PIN protected" when referring to BBM.</comment>


A Generation Grows Up in China Without Google, Facebook or Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/06/technology/china-generation-blocked-internet.html <comment><USER2> I heard Reddit was also added to China's blacklist recently, you have to wonder if that is directly connected to the change of ownership / reddit turning into a privacy black hole..</comment>