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People will see this and their brains will short circuit, like
yours
is now.
People will stand transfixed as their minds goes over and over
the possible ramifications of this bizarre arrangement of
numbers. "Was this a simple mistake? Does this portend the
end
of the universally agreed
to pricing standards as we know
them?
Is this plan to take over my brain? Am I wearing pants? Does
that
really matter at this point?"
A tectonic shift in pricing or an exercise in mind control?
You're
trying to look away but even now every atom of your being is
screaming "Type $18.43 in Google search and see what pops
up."
You don't want to, but you must.
$18.43. Just a number? You can tell yourself that. Whatever
helps
you sleep at night.
Second part of this trilogy.
$19_2eRANDOM_20Price_20Tag
[doctorremulac3, Dec 06 2021]
And the thing that started it.
$19_2e94_20Price_20Tag
[doctorremulac3, Dec 06 2021]
prequel
Stochastic_20rounding
[Loris, Dec 06 2021]
Time Considered As A Helix Of Semi-Precious Stones
https://en.wikipedi...emi-Precious_Stones
Science fiction short story by Samuel R. Delaney. [DrBob, Dec 07 2021]
Superman III
https://www.youtube...watch?v=N7JBXGkBoFc
Richard Pryor steals the roundings & buys a Ferrari. [DrBob, Dec 07 2021]
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Annotation:
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This is clearly a reference to the year 1843, in which the British
government established a commission to look into problems of
land- holding in Ireland. The commission's report was damning,
but nothing was done. |
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This suggests a good price because ... |
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Not necessarily good, possibly evil. |
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The number locks the human brain into a
maelstrom of
contradicting thoughts. Desire, repulsion, fear,
anxiety and
even calm resignation. |
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But the human mind can't walk away from this
price
without having its programming permanently
changed. Your
DNA will probably remain intact, I don't see
anything
permanent happening at the atomic level, but the
viewer's
life will be divided into "before" and "after" they
experienced the effects of $18.43. |
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We could fund scientific studies but I'm not sure
that would
be safe or even moral. |
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Meh. I barely register the "cents" of a price these days. I use
EFT-POS to pay for everything, so all the tiny differences
come out in the wash. |
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To be honest I try not to look at prices these days. |
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Thing is though, at least here, they've decided to do away with pennies and tax people at five and seven percent brackets so transactions are hardly ever a number without multiple numbers after the final decimal point and so get rounded up by whatever fraction of a cent isn't accounted for. |
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Where do you think all those fractions of a penny go? |
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Just asking for a friend. |
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//Where do you think all those fractions of a penny go?// |
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I'm gonna guess, to a rounding-errors account, where they
probably balance out to around zero over time. |
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However, the idea that someone might steal them was
proposed in science fiction several decades ago. |
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So, does it really happen? |
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Well, I've poked around in quite a few accounting databases
over the years, and several of them have had a rounding-
errors account, but I've never yet seen an excitingly large
balance in one, somewhat to my disappointment. |
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[DrBob] would be your man to confirm or disconfirm this. |
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I'm a bit disappointed. I thought it would be a price like
$34.81-7i, or
perhaps an interesting mixture of constants. $e^(i pi)+1
would be a
bargain. |
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////Where do you think all those fractions of a penny
go?//// |
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//I'm gonna guess, to a rounding-errors account, where
they probably
balance out to around zero over time.// |
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If they're always rounded up as 2fries says, that's not going
to happen. |
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//However, the idea that someone might steal them was
proposed in
science fiction several decades ago.// |
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I would have said that this happened in reality and was
known as the
salami trapdoor technique, but a google search suggests
that it's
much less of a common term than I thought.
Sorry - I mean much fewer of a common term. |
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I think all pricing should be in binary. |
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This item costs £10,011.1111110101110000101 |
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Makes everyone feel really rich |
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The only price that ever really blew my mind was when oil
went into negative territory. That was trippy. |
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OK, I'm not sure whether that was what was meant. If tax
calculations are always rounded in favor of the taxing authority,
then the rounding fractions go to wherever the rest of the tax
money goes. But there's nothing mysterious about that, so I
supposed that something else must have been meant. |
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//The only price that ever really blew my mind
was when oil went into negative territory. That was
trippy.// |
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And the moment I decided to stop trying to figure out
economics. |
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Thank you pert, I specifically wanted to test you.
"Wonder if pertinax will catch it if I spell maelstrom
wrong." I was a fool to doubt you, you passed with
flying colors. |
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Didn't some-one(s) get caught & prosecuted for siphoning off
the bank rounding errors?
Also, I've been told that banks do sort-of this with
transactions. It's why everything takes "overnight"; so that
bank can "steal" the little bit of interest generated by the
money sitting there over night. |
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Wasn't that hard. There wasn't enough oil storage
available, so the cost of storing exceeded the oil
value and nobody wanted it yet. |
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//It's why everything takes "overnight"// |
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No. I mean, yes, they do that, but no, that's not the same *kind*
of stealing. It's a different scam. It has nothing to do with
rounding. |
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//[DrBob] would be your man to confirm or disconfirm this//
Did somebody call?
In the systems that I've used, tax is a calculated figure (whether rounded up or rounded down) & the resulting calculation is what is applied in the accounts. So there is no balance for 'rounding differences' in this respect. You do get some small balances elsewhere for rounding in the accounts, particularly with automated processes, but as pertinax points out, these are disappointingly (or comfortingly, depending on your perspective) small.
On the other hand, there is always some kind of holding account on the balance sheet, a place for things to rest whilst someone works out where it should really go. Most commonly these will be linked to the Treasury Management/Cash Receipting process &, if not managed efficiently, can get out of hand very quickly indeed, resulting in some very large sums of money not being properly accounted for.
If you haven't got proper division of duties in your finance function (quite likely given that you are already not managing your cash properly), then an unscrupulous person might be able to arrange for these balances to be re-located to somewhere where they might be of more immediate use. Say, the purchase of a flashy sports car, for example.
They have been largely phased out now, but outgoing Uncashed Cheques was a great target for this sort of thing as all of your accounting processes are already expecting money to go out of the bank account, so there is no need for a potential fraudster to invent much in the way of false documentation.
Sadly, the purpose of flashy sports cars is to show them off. So the method of your discovery is inadvertantly engineered into the whole fraud process. People who steal things are seldom the type of people to quietly shuffle the money off into a long term investment & then sit tight for 20 years. If they get away with it the first time, they nearly always feel the urge to keep on stealing stuff.
Sometimes however, if you reach a particular level of self-confidence at this & your ambition becomes more grandiose, your misdeeds become magically legal & more tools become available for you to carry out your nefarious schemes. You are eventually able to steal the whole country & large parts of the rest of the world. Once you've persuaded enough idiots to vote for you, obviously. |
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//so that bank can "steal" the little bit of interest generated by the money sitting there over night//
I'm not normally one for defending big business but this is certainly not stealing & is part of the t's & c's of a bank contract. The interest generated on your transaction likely wouldn't amount to much (especially at current interest rates) but the interest that the bank makes is from lending out the accumulated balance of all their daily transactions. It is how, at their most basic, banks work.
Other businesses do it too, lending out their daily cash balance on the market to generate interest. Wonder why, for example, payment terms are 28 days? It's not because it takes that long to process your invoice or pay out your cheque/money transfer, it's because the organisation you are doing business with is lending that money out to gain interest on it. |
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And because of cashflow, of course |
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Yes, agreed, although that is very dependent on the size & nature of the business. A bank or a large multinational has no problem with cashflow, generally speaking (unless they are going to the wall), whereas, say, a haulage company or a small retail supplier is likely to be very tight on cash at any given time. |
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