Entries tagged “Money”

Four years ago, a writer named Courtney Martin had a novel idea. She created a startup “charity” concept that gives people $100 to do nice things for strangers:

“One hundred dollars is not going to change anyone’s life,” Martin said. “It’s a small thing. The money is just a framework for people to use their imagination. It’s like a kick in the ass.”

One of the participants had trouble giving away the $100. It seems people are naturally suspicious when you’re being nice to them:

“I will give you $1 for you to give to someone else,” the sign said. Throughout the evening rush, Lockspeiser stood in the station, trying to give away dollar bills.

“Everyone though I was trying to scam them,” he said. “They wanted to know what I was up to. I told them they just had to promise to give the $1 to someone else.”

After three hours, Lockspeiser had managed to give away only $52. One passer-by did not take the $1 but, suspecting that Lockspeiser was down and out, handed him a pair of socks. [emphasis mine]

Read “Secret Society for Creative Philanthropy” at SFGate (via Marginal Revolution)

Yesterday, I finally found some time to haul our spare change container off to the bank for conversion into cash money. The container, a vintage flour canister, had been overflowing for several weeks and a trip was long overdue. As I heaved the coins out of the car, I found myself thinking about how I had heard somewhere that the materials used to make the penny (copper-plated zinc) were worth more money than the penny itself. That nugget was quickly forgotten, however, when I found out our “throwaway” change was worth just over $370. Disco party time!

This morning, the penny returned to my thoughts when @linklog pointed to a blog post about the production costs associated with the penny and nickel:

In recent years the penny has cost approximately 1.8 cents and the nickel approximately 9 cents to produce. Costs have exceeded the value of these two coins by over $100 million in prior years.

That quote comes from the 2011 US Budget which includes a directive enabling “the Department of the Treasury to explore, analyze, and approve new, less expensive materials for all circulating coins.” Is this what Obama meant when he promised to deliver “change?” (sorry about that, I couldn’t help myself)