Questions and Answers: Volume 27
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February is the shortest month of the year. It's the flex month, where we stick extra days to make the calendar work. Depending on what hemisphere you're in, it can be a month of warmth and sunshine or a month of short days and cold weather. But it's also a month of something else. It's a month where you have questions and I have answers. Stay tuned for the 27th installment of Questions and Answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. ♪♪♪

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Let's jump right in with the first question. Dan Banowetz asks, Should we get rid of the US penny? They cost more than they're worth and seem to be unnecessary. The short answer is, yes, we should probably stop manufacturing them. But that doesn't mean that we are getting rid of them, however. As you mentioned, we lose money on every penny we create because the materials and processing cost more than the actual coin. The difference in the value of money and the cost to make it is known as seniorage.

The penny has negative seniorage, which is a big signal that it is no longer worth making. This is entirely a function of inflation. You literally cannot buy anything anymore with a single penny. Growing up, I could at least put a penny in a gumball machine and get a tiny gumball out. But you can't even do that anymore, assuming you could even find a gumball machine.

The penny has been studied extensively, and what we have found is that most people don't even use them. They quickly leave circulation as people put them in coffee cans or piggy banks because they don't want to carry them around. People literally give them away in take-a-penny containers. This wouldn't be the first time that we got rid of a low-value coin. In the 19th century, the United States had a half-penny that it eventually stopped making. The way you do it is you don't ban the penny, you just stop making new ones.

All pennies currently in circulation would still be legal tender. Over time, they would end up at banks and be retired, but if you have any pennies, you're still free to use them. There are other countries that have done this. Canada stopped making pennies a few years ago. Prices are still priced normally and are charged to the nearest cent. If you pay with a credit or debit card, you pay the normal price. If you pay with cash, you just round up or down.

The most the price would be adjusted for anything would be two cents, which would be a trivial amount for most transactions. This will probably have to be addressed at some point as well with nickels, because it currently costs over 10 cents to produce a single nickel. The cost could be lessened by changing the metals used, but it's still going to be an issue as inflation gets worse. Gabriel Cervantes asks, why is gasoline in the USA priced to the nine-tenths of a cent?

This is a very good question, as nothing else in the economy is regularly priced at a fraction of a cent. And this actually goes back to a law passed in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression. At the time, the average price for a gallon of gasoline was approximately 18 cents. Gas stations, rather than rounding up, began adjusting prices in fractions of a cent to stay competitive. The law was supposed to expire in 1934, but instead it was extended and the tax increased.

Gas stations began adding the nine-tenths to the price per gallon, and it just became the norm. And this was mainly due to a psychological condition known as the charm pricing effect. For example, consumers perceive $3.49 as $3.49 rather than rounding up to $3.50.

The practice became an industry standard, and any station choosing to round up may lose customers, especially in the 1930s when that nine-tenths of a cent may have amounted to close to 5% of the total price per gallon. The effect of nine-tenths of a cent has become smaller and smaller as gas prices have risen, but stations keep doing it because every little bit helps, especially given the low margins in selling gasoline.

Penny Jessup asks, besides your writing and the research that you do for that writing, do you have any artistic sides to your life? Do you have any hobbies? What do you do to keep yourself busy on long plane rides? Well, I don't take too many plane rides anymore. Since the pandemic started and I launched this podcast, my hands have been pretty full. That being said, as far as artistic endeavors, I am an accomplished travel photographer. I've been named Travel Photographer of the Year by both the North American Travel Journalists Association and the Society of American Travel Writers.

I've done gallery showings, and my entire apartment has photos I've taken all over the walls. Again, I don't do much photography anymore, but I have done quite a bit. Chloe Boyer asks, I've been involved in scouts as a leader for over 11 years along with my son. Fingers crossed that he gets his eagle, but it's his journey and only he can do it. Do you have any interesting stories about your time in Boy Scouts? Well, yes, I have one really interesting one.

Back in 1983, my local council was celebrating its 10th anniversary and was having a big jamboree to celebrate. The big guest of honor for the event was Bill Hillcourt, aka Green Bar Bill, the man who wrote the Boy Scout Handbook. By this time, he was well into his 80s. When I heard about this, I took the initiative and wrote him a letter inviting him to have lunch with our troop. He accepted, and I got to meet him, got my photo taken with him, and had him sign my handbook.

John Hingham asks, do you ever suffer from travel burnout? If so, what did you do to mix things up? The answer to that is I absolutely have suffered from travel burnout. Traveling extensively can be very tiring. And what I'd usually do is I'd just go on what I called an anti-vacation. I'd hole up in some place and just stay there for a few weeks playing video games. I stayed in Saigon for almost a month, just hanging out and working. I did the same thing in Melbourne, Bangkok, and several other places around the world.

Everyone I know who has traveled full-time eventually gets burned out. It's pretty unavoidable if you travel long enough. Derek Albert asks, I imagine you must be a sensation on a pub quiz team. Are you a fan? How in demand are you and how do you generally fare? In addition, what are your favorite quiz questions of all time? The truth is, I have never been asked to be on a pub quiz team, although I have run some quiz nights at local pubs.

I had a reputation, not surprisingly, of having the hardest trivia questions in the area. Most pub quizzes tend to be orientated towards popular culture questions, for which I would probably do horribly. I do much better on the type of topics that you would listen to on this podcast. Steve Gulliver asks, Given your extensive travels, have you seen or been affected by any big storms or natural phenomena that have left you awestruck?

"Uh, sort of. I was in Maui during the 2011 Japanese tsunami. We had plenty of advance warning and knew exactly when it was going to hit. It turned out not to be a very big deal, but the lead up to the tsunami hitting was actually really interesting. All the locals were pretty casual about it. All the Europeans that were visiting wanted to climb a mountain to avoid it." Kevin Carden asks, "What are the hottest and coldest temperatures you've ever experienced during your travels and where were they?"

How brutal did they feel? I've experienced negative 30 Fahrenheit wind chill in Alaska and 117 Fahrenheit air temp in Indio, California. But I imagine you've seen greater extremes. Well, the hottest I've ever seen was in the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia. The temperature in the thermometer in the car I was in read 50 degrees Celsius, which is 122 degrees Fahrenheit. I also experienced very close to the same temperature when I visited Uluru in Australia in the middle of the summer.

The coldest I've experienced was somewhere around negative 40 to negative 45 Fahrenheit, which is basically the same thing in Celsius. And that does not include any wind chill, it's just raw temperature. And I experienced that in Whitehorse, Yukon in the middle of the winter. Kevin O'Keefe asks, who was your favorite teacher and why? In high school, I would have to go with my debate coach, Mrs. Heckrell. If it wasn't for her and debate, I would have a very different life today.

In college, I would have to go with several different professors. I had an economics professor, Vasant Sukhatme, who was great and taught microeconomics. I had a mathematics professor, Stan Wagon, who I took a senior seminar with on number theory, and I know he sometimes listens to the show. I had a political science professor, Chuck Green, who was a real standout in the department. And I also had a great debate coach and argumentation professor, Scott Nobles, who also happened to be the very first winner of the national debate tournament in 1947.

October Sky asks, Hi Gary, I'm glad to know that my favorite podcaster is also a fellow Packer fan. Anyways, you have mentioned that you prefer Civilization V over Civilization VI. I formally disagree with your opinion. Are you looking forward to Civilization VII or do you expect to keep playing old reliable Civilization V? Well, I'm certainly going to try Civilization VII when it comes out in about a week. I'm holding off any judgment until I actually play it.

There are some things about it that I saw in the trailers that seem interesting, and there are other parts that seem kind of dumb. Picking a totally new civilization in each era seems to me odd. Given how the time between each version of Civilization gets longer and longer, it'll probably be another 20 years until Civilization VIII is released. Geronimo Richison asks, Have you ever met Mike Duncan of the Revolutions podcast? If so, what do you think about him and his works?

I've never met him. Despite what many people think, all the podcasters do not know each other. That being said, I have listened to every episode of both the History of Rome and the Revolutions podcast, and I highly recommend both of them. Jana Elsie asks, do you play a musical instrument? And if so, what do you play? Well, Jana, I do not play any musical instrument. I tried playing a trumpet in grade school and I was truly horrible at it. I mean, I was really, really bad.

I gave it up and have never attempted to play an instrument since. I like to think that if I really applied myself, I could learn how to do almost anything. However, the exception to that is playing an instrument. I have no aptitude for it whatsoever. I enjoy music and I appreciate music, but I can't play it.

There are people on the local symphony orchestra that I get to meet a couple times a year when they come by a local pub, and I'm able to have actual high-level conversations with them about classical music. But there is a limit to what I'm able to talk about because I myself am not a musician. The last question comes from Jimmy AK who asks,

When you write repisodes, do you go completely old school and just open up the word processor and start typing? Or do you use any sort of AI tools to either simply help with completing sentences and grammar more quickly, grammarly or something similar, or full-blown AI MMLs that help generate the outline and content where you then do some cleanup and editing?

Well, Jimmy, all of my scripts are written in Google Docs. Every single one since the first episode has been written this way. This allows me to switch between my laptop and desktop computers without having to worry about version control. I've also used Grammarly since the very first episode. It does a pretty good job of doing copy editing on the fly as I'm writing, which allows me to write faster. I have played around with some AI tools, but it's still pretty limited with what I can do.

You can't just say, write 2,000 words on this subject and have it give you a full script ready-made. What it will come up with is usually very boring and never what I'm looking for. I have a very specific story arc for each episode, and an AI tool can't really give me what I'm looking for. By definition, a large language model will give you something average.

The one area I have used AI in writing is when I have a very broad subject and I need to figure out how to narrow it down or determine what the most important points are. For example, I've been working on an episode on the religions of ancient civilizations. And there are a number of major and minor gods, festivals, and practices that could be covered, but I need to narrow it down.

AI can usually do a good job of providing an outline of what the most important things to cover are, although it will almost always skip smaller things that are still quite interesting that I would like to mention in the show. So, the vast majority of what I do is still old-fashioned writing in a word processor. That concludes this month's question and answers. If you would like to leave a question for next month, just join the Facebook group or the Discord server, links to which can be found in the show notes.

The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Benji Long and Cameron Kiefer. I want to give a big shout out to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon, including the show's producers. Your support helps me put out a show every single day. And also, Patreon is currently the only place where Everything Everywhere Daily merchandise is available to the top tier of supporters.

If you'd like to talk to other listeners of the show and members of the Completionist Club, you can join the Everything Everywhere Daily Facebook group or Discord server. Links to everything are in the show notes.