Origin Of An Unworkable Idea: Don't Count Your Bits (Because There's A Fee For That) · 5:14pm Apr 17th, 2017
"Where do you get your ideas?"
The standard answer is "There's a P.O. Box in Schenectady..." But in truth, sometimes an idea is just the product of being an organic computer which takes in random bits of data from the world around it and uses them for constant low-level reprogramming. It's sort of like being an eclectic garbage dump with a touch of attention deficit disorder.
Consider, for a moment, coin-counting services.
Many in the States will be familiar with the machines. (I don't know if there are equivalents outside the borders.) Basically, when you get metal coins as change, they can pile up. For those who still use cash, many stick to paper money and don't put their coins into play, simply dropping them into a jar and allowing them to accumulate. And so there exist machines which do nothing but count coins and then print you a receipt for the total, which you can then take to customer service (typically in a supermarket or bank) and present in exchange for paper money again.
Of course, it costs money to build such machines. And there's some electricity involved in running them, plus have you seen the cost of printer ink lately? So the machine charges for the service. How much? Well, some banks will let you use theirs for free if you have an account with that branch, but otherwise, you're typically looking at 6% to 11% of the total counted.
This may feel like something of a ripoff. You're basically being charged for having money. (Admittedly, given U.S. tax laws, that's pretty much the default citizenship condition.) But people still use those fee-taking machines, because who wants to pay for anything with a pile of change? And the machine's inventors, who only had to spend the build fee once, collect their percentage. Over and over, presumably laughing all the way.
Now, I use those machines. To wit, when I need to convert metal to paper in a hurry, I use the one at my bank, which costs nothing. And when I want to spend in a focused manner? Well, one of the U.S. counting machines (Coinstar) is Internet-linked, and it'll count your coins and turn them into a gift card credit for your choice of their many corporate partners -- for a very reasonable counting fee of 0%. So sometimes, when my bad luck is bidding its time and withholding effort until something big comes along, I'll save up change for a while and then dump it all onto Amazon, typically followed by having said bad luck strike and make me wish I still had the extra funds.
Yesterday, I was in a supermarket, and I passed by their Coinstar. I took a moment to check the Specials on the touchscreen, because sometimes they have a "Dump $40, get a bonus $5" special for one of their partners -- no, nothing worthwhile, but it's good to check every so often. And then I had a stray thought.
These would be useless in Equestria.
Well, they would, right? The standard purpose of such public machines is to convert metal money into the paper variety. Equestria doesn't have paper money. The 'verse allows for bearer bonds to transfer large amounts, but the security measures on them are fierce and you'll never really see them used for standard spending. And there's a voucher/check system in place -- but for the most part, you carry and spend metal coins. Paper just hasn't caught on. Plus you'd have to figure that a minor aspect of a business or banking mark would be the ability to glance at a pile of money and instantly total it, so...
...actually, it's not as if everypony working in a bank is going to have a banking mark. Same for businesses. Enough ponies would get first-time jobs as cashiers and tellers while waiting for their chance to find a position which was more mark-appropriate. So not everypony working in the occupations which truly need somepony capable of fast-totaling can do it. In that sense, there probably is at least a mild need for such devices. They won't convert into paper money, but they'll at least allow somepony to dump their day's receipts in and get the total placed into their bank account at the other end, just to save tellers from spending most of their hours going "One... two... three..." And that's the main place you'd find those devices: banks. A very few businesses who take in money mane over tail might use them to tally their totals at the end of the day -- but for the most part, it would have to be banks. And charging customers to use them would be --
-- um...
...actually, have you seen the banking industry lately? There are ATMs which will try to charge you a fee just to enter your PIN, and nothing's funnier than the reloadable "debit cards" available at suspect convenience stores everywhere: eight dollars a month just to maintain your account, ten dollar penalty if you don't buy anything with the card in four weeks, five dollars to reload any amount from $1 to $100 (then a percentage thereafter), and checking your balance? Guarantees that balance is now $1.50 less.
The counting devices would cost the bank money, and those machines aren't making any of it back. You can't have outgo without income. So there would be a bank manager somewhere who would try to charge ponies for using the devices. In fact, in the name of saving the tellers some time and making things more efficient, the use of those devices would be mandatory. And so is the fee. Depositing one bit? Sure, that would be easy enough for the teller, but this is policy. The device shall count your one bit. And then confiscate a fraction of it for the bank. Wasn't that convenient?
Now in Ponyville's banking department, we already have Mr. Croesus, who's been noted as being just slightly insane. He has his staff chipping receipts into huge tablets of stone because that kind of documentation is parasprite-proof: it's not exactly the sign of a pony whose reality has completely synchronized with your own. And he loves money. Truly, he loves it so. His special talent may include the ability to go swimming in the central vault. And he might invest in a counting device, simply to make his bank more efficient. Then he would start to charge for its use, because a bank will skim everywhere it can.
And then he might get creative.
Account maintenance fees. Use Of The Special Fast Line fee. Did you use the quills and inkwells to make out your deposit slip? Let's figure out the wear on the quill, usage on the ink, and then throw on a profit margin. It would reach the point where it might literally cost his customers a bit to say hello, or at least to have the teller say it back: employee time taken away from banking requires payment of the Social Interaction Fee. And this would all accumulate until it drove his angry customer base to do the one thing no bank can survive: withdraw all of their money. Everypony, at the same time. The Counting Out Your Withdrawal Fee, even in bulk, wouldn't be enough to secure anything. The bank would be sent into a state of potential collapse until Mr. Croesus relented and brought things back to normal. And why would he relent? Not because he cared about his customers or recognized that he'd gone too far. No, he would reluctantly revert for a more important reason: the money was leaving him.
The final punchline of this? Probably trying to charge a one-time Account Reopening Fee. At which point, the sight of the stampede heading towards the doors would create the final surrender.
So why do I consider this idea to be unworkable? There's a few reasons.
* It's a little too soon after Barnyard Barge-Ins for dipping into anything even partially business-related again.
* Banking isn't exactly inherently funny. At best, we're looking at economic cringe comedy, with most of the cringe coming from recognition of the real. In the 'too close' department, this is on that level of feeling someone's hands reaching into your pockets.
* Three words: Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist. (And that's the best-case scenario.) For the story directly above, I treated Mr. Rich as I generally do: a highly ethical businesspony who truly cares about the welfare of his employees and looks out for his customers. He doesn't price-gouge, he's been known to offer credit to those in dire financial straits (and might have a lapse in memory come collection time), and he actively contributes to the community. He's not a villain -- and in giving him that treatment, I'm starting to feel like I'm in the minority.
Mr. Croesus? Will follow banking regulations to the letter. However, he also writes some of those regulations. And when it comes to money... well, he might not wind up in places where Wells Fargo has gone before, but it doesn't mean he hasn't figured out how it would work. Once he realizes he can get ponies to pay one fee, he'll go for more. And more, and more, and... see ending suggested above. I'd have to end the story with him at least somewhat beaten (but not repentant), and I'm not sure I can inflict enough pain upon him to do justice. Yes, he might attempt to physically block all access to the vault, but it's also a little too soon for a second trampling. It's a Take That! story which may not be able to deliver enough in the way of That.
(I can see him calling on the police to stop ponies from withdrawing their money. Pity he was collecting fees from Miranda, isn't it?)
So on the whole, it doesn't seem like something I can work with right now. It just goes on the junkyard pile: perhaps to be examined again later and given a polish, perhaps to be ignored.
But... this is what can come into my mind from looking at a coin-counting machine in the entry foyer of a supermarket.
Imagine what I could get from a pilgrimage to the P.O. Box in Schenectady.
Several episodes have been shown where Ponies use gems for money. (Just For Sidekicks, for instance). Not into paper money but coins to gems & back might work.
As to being unsympathetic. Did you ever watch Green Acres? Mr. Haney was a total scam artist. The Jack Benny Show, Jack was a total miser & it was funny. So was Mr. Moony on one of the Lucy shows.
Maybe the Flim Flam brothers invented the machine & are trying to convince either Mr. Rich or Mr. Croesus that it is worth buying? I remember an old joke bout a farmer sending a letter to a company "Your salesman said it would pay for itself. So why are you sending ME this bill?"
In EQ, maybe it could pay for itself.
Inspiration strikes in the most fascinating ways, doesn't it?
Of course, this does raise the question of what denominations ponies use beyond the bit. You've introduced fractional denominations and the show has mentioned cents, but what about larger purchases? Is a pony who owes ten thousand bits expected to transfer ten thousand discs of metal? And then there's that oh-dso-ambiguous gem-to-bit exchange rate...
Equestria's currency definitely raises questions. And where there are questions, there are potential stories... though not necessarily good ones. Not unless you're mylittleeconomy.
This is only tangentially related, but every time I hear how the US Banking system works for private persons I think people are joking. I mean, the stuff you say here is completely insane.
Also, it may all fail when we reach fractions of bits, which can't probably be properly accounted for, which means he has to round up or down, which means he may end stealing according to some old Equestrian acts from the time Celestia dismantled the Trader-guilds.
4499661
I'm not as old as you seem to think I am. (Although I'm roughly familiar with Mr. Benny's work: I have a minor passion for vaudeville, which I hope to put into a story eventually -- Equestria's still in the right age to have a circuit, although the cinema will become a problem. And if you think some of the local businessponies are corrupt? They have nothing on the United Booking Office, which got the performers coming, going, and standing still.) And the thing about a UCP is that there has to be some degree of comeuppance eventually, or the Karma Houdini problems kick in. Jack Benny's cheapness was punished by the universe itself, "Yeeeeeeees?" I have Comeuppance, but I'm not sure there's enough Degree to work.
The brothers might invent such a device, but they would want all fees to be put into their own saddlebags. Or, ideally, to create a device which collected the bits, then printed out a receipt which could be redeemed absolutely nowhere, followed by their keeping all the bits. The 'verse versions aren't much for sharing, and their problem with this invention would be having it give anything back.
As discussed in another Comments section, I try to avoid the gem market: it's just about as unstable as cherries.
And now that I think about it, there is another use for this device in Equestria: consolidation. There have to be large-denomination coins out there for ponies who must carry huge amounts of liquid funds. (The thousand-bit coin is probably as far as the system generally goes.) So for those who want to bring their assets down to something easier to carry...
I just realized how these machines would be designed in Equestria.
They'd be precisely calibrated scales.
Seriously: if all money is in coins, you just have to get one pile, all made out of one particular type of coins, and weigh it.
Then, divide that by the weight of a single coin. You now have the number of coins in the pile.
Of course, cheating the Average Joe by through crooked measurements is something that's older than feudalism, and was a popular practice once upon a time...
4499667
As immediately above. The U.S. supposedly got rid of the largest bills because doing so made it harder for criminals to do cash-only transactions: in reality, it just created new and exciting ways to get around the problem. The system used to go a long way beyond the $100. To wit:
mentalfloss.com/sites/default/legacy/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/wilson-100-grand.jpg
Yes, that was real American currency, although it didn't really see public use.
Equestria probably feels secure in minting 1,000-bit coins for the citizenry, and there may be larger denominations which are typically reserved for the government. Of course, the problem with a coin system is that somepony is going to drop them...
4499681
No, I never thought you were THAT old, but these shows have been syndicated & will thus outlive Celestia. The religious channel is still showing Davey & Goliath . That show was on the air when I was a kid. Not to mention newer stuff like Superbook
4499687
And for societies which minted from precious metal, shortchanging could be done on the customer end through literal shaving of the money. There's even a practice where you carry gold coins in a leather bag, making sure to frequently jostle and shake your funds -- and at the end of a week, overturn the pouch and carefully collect all the gold dust which was produced by the impacts. (In Equestria, gold itself doesn't have much value, so ponies trying this would effectively lose money.) For any culture using money, there's someone who's figured out what they feel is a surefire way to make sure they keep more of it...
I believe scales and coin weight is part of how modern counting machines operate, which is why they reject nickels through quarters minted in 1964 or earlier: while they remain money, they're partially silver, and so the mass isn't right. A professional Equestrian coin scale would need some ability to detect enchantments: there's undoubtedly been more than a few ponies who tried to make a tenth-bit look like something more valuable, and there might be spells out there which would temporarily change mass.
Even conventional weighing could be suspect. A field pressing down on one end of the scale...
4499706
There used to be a thing called "coin clipping". To make it harder to do, coins started to have a milled edge. EQ coins don't seem to have that. There also used to be an obscure US law that coins were valued by weight & you could discount the value of the shortage (I know because it came up in one of the Mr. Tutt stories by Arthur Train (pre WWI lawyer))
If you live near Schenectady, can you explain to me just what the appeal of the Garbage Plate is? I do like most of the ingredients on their own, but combining them all makes me shudder.
Hmmm, what would be on a ponified Garbage Plate?
4499671 The fees idea was rolling out a lot ten years ago, then banks realized it was a bad long term strategy to keep customers and most of it has lapsed.
Y'know, it just occurred to me that Equestria has a coin currency and 2/3 of its population manipulates it primarily by mouth. Bank workers must take so many sick days.
I imagine if you pointed that out you could convince a reasonable proportion to start using a machine that stacked coins into dispensers for a small fee. The downside is that everyone starts looking like a 1980s arcade worker, but you take the good with the bad I suppose.
I wonder if you'd have more or less success if you pitched it to the flower trio first?
I've got notes on a story about Ponyville's first bank robber, who comes into the little one-room bank run by Silver Certificate and winds up employed as a bank guard, with every single bit in his pocket in the bank and in debt by the end of the story.
"You want me to guard your bank?"
Silver Certificate nodded, his long white mane making a nearly hypnotic bobbing. "Yes, of course. You're a strong young lad who prefers an inside job with little manual lifting. You've even got the cutie mark for it," he added, pointing at Early Withdraw's moneybag mark.
"But that's for taking money from other ponies," said Early rather slowly.
"What do you think a bank does?" asked Silver Certificate. "We take money from ponies and keep it for them while loaning it out to ponies with and charging more interest for the ones who need a loan. Borrow at two, lend at three, go home at four is what my grandfather always said."
Updated: This Is a Stick-Up is complete and ready to be read. (Some minor fees apply)
Why is Miranda Rights named Miranda Rights when Miranda isn't a pony name? There's nopony to name the Miranda Rights after.
And the award for least interesting question goes to...
4499697
Let's be fair: There are maybe four religious cartoons in the world that don't suck, two of those aren't syndication length, and one is increasingly going off the rails.
4499825
There are more species out there than just ponies.
4499810
Trying to take my "Most Cynical 'Verse" title, are we?
4499722
As pointed out, most coins are manipulated using the mouth, perhaps some grooves you can feel with your tongue could be employed?
4499837
Oh, how many does your 'verse have? Donkeys and Minatours have the same naming dynamics as ponies, dragons are always rocks (except when the writers don't care) Diamond Dogs are all dog names, and Griffons all start with the letter G. The only species with normal names would be the Sea Serpent Steven Magnet. What's Steven like here? Was Miranda a Sea Serpent?
4499706 Yea based on what we've seen in the show my idea is the bit isn't gold because it's all that valuable, but becasue it's easy to enchant. Sure Twilight might be good enough to do it but most unicorns have no hope of matching the complex magical lattice pressed into each coin when it's minted. it doesn't do much of anything of course, that would be rally expensive, but it is near definitive for this is real Equestrian money, and though it doesn't come up much there are numerous ways to test it. One might be the coins actually do something, like glow when submerged in water, to give a semi-clear sign they're real. Though obviously some magical item would be required to be sure.
There is of course also the other option, to use unworkable ideas as a sort of noodle incident.
4499681
You know, you could totally pull a story out of Trixie about why she quit the Circuit. I have to admit I'm dying to see how you write her once Triptych gets there.
I Australia, the only coin sorters I've seen have been behind the counter at banks. And they are only used for deposit to an account. I've also seen coin-based ATMs, mostly for deposits, and I believe to use them you need a business account with the bank.
While there is still a thriving cash economy, Australians have embraced the debit and credit card (along with electronic-funds-transfer) so completely that the only checks a person might see in a lifetime are if they buy a house.
Although, we do have our own problems with the banking sector:
4499837 Hey, we're talking *bankers* here. No level of cynicism can be overdone. Want to step it up a notch? Investment bankers like Madoff.
4499706
They also validate coins by magnetic properties, which is the primary reason coins of the "wrong" composition get rejected.
(So do bill acceptors, for that matter, which is one reason you can't pass off an inkjet or laser-printed counterfeit in automated vending machines -- and yes, people have tried. The bill acceptor doesn't just examine the money visually, it also examines the magnetic pattern formed by the metal-impregnated ink, and if it doesn't match, it'll be kicked out.)
4499937
I think the Equestrian language needs a proper collective term for a group of bankers. May I humbly suggest "wunch"?
(as in "What a wunch of bankers!")
4500151 I thought the proper term was 'Cell block'
4500185
I am pretty sure politicians already have that one.
While it certainly can apply to both demographics (insert comment about politicians being bought out here), it does not really form a memorable Spoonerism...
4499825 You could ask that about Fu Manchu, Romeo, Casanova, and possibly others, as mentioned in the show. And that's before you get to them using our world's place names and demonyms (or at least the English language versions).
4500258 Ah, but pony-ized, you have Casa Nova, or the stallion who tends to set houses (and the mares who live there) on fire with desire.
4500151
4500185
It reminds me of the old joke...
Why did the Irish call their currency the "Punt"?
Because it rhymes with their word for "Banker".
To answer your question about those coin counting machines outside the US yes we have them in the UK
4499667
"The most common unit of currency is the bit, which is divided into 100 cents. Eight bits make a silver lune, and twenty lunes a gold sol, which unsurprisingly bear the moon and the sun on one side, and the faces of Princess Luna and Princess Celestia on the other. (Until recently, they had only Princess Celestia's face, but the Royal Mint has been taking old lunes out of circulation and re-minting them. At the moment, an old-fashioned lune is worth approximately lune and a half for certain coin collectors.)
However, twenty-one lunes is a gold phoenix, which hasn't been minted in three centuries but is used as a currency of account, and traditionally the prices of several luxury items, like gemstones, hats, and spices are nominated in phoenixes. Rarity has, by necessity, become very handy at converting between sols and phoenixes.
For really big exchanges, say if you want to buy or sell a farm, or a Canterlot townhouse, or an airship, you mostly use letters of credit, which mean that the bankers move gold from your pile to the seller's pile, or vice versa, and charge you both a small commission for the convenience of not having to tote all that gold around or hiring a guard or two.
Occasionally, though, you have to use bullion bars, minted from gold or platinum; they're used in foreign trade, for example, since dragons consider the idea of banking fundamentally indecent, and griffons like shiny things. Then, of course, you can use gemstones for trade; they're convenient since you can carry the price of, say, a Canterlot boutique in your saddlebags, but not everyone accepts gems, and there's a whole process of assaying to make sure the gems really are worth what you claim they are.
Then there are the regional currencies, the best known of which are the Las Pegasus tokens, worth money at their casinos and funhouses, but worthless elsewhere except as collectibles, the Cloudsdale skybits worth 120 cents (which led to Rainbow Dash feeling really good about her first paycheck, before Fluttershy explained the exchange rate to her), and the Crystal Empire's heart-shaped crystal bits that come in clear, aquamarine, amber and pink colors."
-- Twilight Sparkle, "How Much For That Turnip?" A Practical Pony's Arguments For Decimal Currency Reform.
4500531
Headcanon considered, at the very least. Thank you for that.
I'm one of those people that goes to their bank to get coins. I carry ninety-nine cents in my pocket for each place I plan on visiting while out-an-about because I pay in cash, not debt, for most things and like to give exact change.
If you have four pennies, three quarters, two nickels, and a dime you can give any amount of change, under a dollar, once and that is the lowest amount coins you can do such with.
I like sharing that bit of trivia.
4499810
Oh, it's even better than that, here, in our world. "Fractional reserve banking" has been the basic concept underlying the economies of Western nations since someone at the Bank of London had this beautiful little idea about four hundred and fifty years back.
Q: if you have $100 in deposits, how much money can you lend out?
A: there's no limit at all
...unless the government imposes one; currently it's five-to-one for banks and twenty-to-one for credit card companies in the US, and their lobbyists are constantly pushing for higher limits, in the name of "economic growth," of course.
So long as too many don't default on their debts simultaneously with too many of your depositors withdrawing their funds, it's almost as good as having a license to print money. And when the bankers find themselves caught short, you may always rest assured the resulting "bank panic" will always be everyone else's fault, and anyway, they're "too big to fail." If you or I try to pass checks without the funds to cover them, we go to jail. When a banker does it? That's just how they've done business since time out of mind. You don't want to interfere with "economic growth," do you?
In "serious" economic forums, as you may already have guessed, asking the wrong questions about this particular sca--I mean, fiscal policy--will get you called everything but a flat-Earther and maybe that too, right before the ban.
On pocket change: I have found that I can keep it from accumulating in unwieldy quantities by going to the self-checkout lines that have become so popular and common of late in American supermarkets and department stores. When the time comes to pay, I select "cash" and begin stuffing pennies into the slot until they are gone.
(if that link plays the whole video, the punchline is at 1:43)
I have also had a recent, and humbling, revelation about where some of my own ideas come from, and how my own muse works, bu tI need to think about this some more.
>> Brumby Run
I've seen some of the ones you're talking about. My mother used to run the tuckshop at my primary school and she used to have to take the weeks takings to the bank at the end of the week and since most of that was in coins...
However I have seen some Commonwealth bank branches with ones that operate very much like the Estee describes. Empty your coins in, it counts it automatically and spits out a receipt. You take the receipt to the teller and that amount (along with any notes) can then be deposited into your account. Or they can give you that amount in notes for a 10% service fee. I've used them a time or two myself when I did doorknock appeals for charities a while ago.
>> devas
That's exactly what my bank does. They offer small plastic bags (I think these are standardised across the banking industry in Australia) that you can sort your coins into. Separate denominations in separate bag up to a limit which varies from denomination and then when you take the money in they just weigh it on a set of electronic scales. It doesn't help that I'm a pain in the but and save up my coins until I've got a heap and then dump them on the poor tellers.
4499825
4515283
... I'm Schwarzenegger, right? *Nervous grin*
4515650
Sure, we'll go with that.
(When ever I hear the word 'Miranda', regardless of context, this clip is the first thing that goes through my head.)