I've been listening to Marketplace less because of stories like this. The half cent went away, the penny went away, other countries have discontinued currencies. You keep accepting pennies and you round when people pay in cash. At some point, your register will do the rounding for you. There isn't really a story here.
There's a bunch of regulations that need tweaking. AIUI, it's illegal to charge SNAP more than other customers. someone who paid cash and gets rounded down technically pays less than what the government got charged. It's only on the order of pennies, I don't think the law cares about that at all.
That one is easy without regulatory changes: just round the SNAP transactions. The SNAP equal treatment rule only requires charging SNAP customers the same price as cash purchases, not the same price as credit or debit card purchases.
Is that a federal law or state law? Whichever jurisdiction it is, surely you'd only need a one-clause amendment to add an exception for rounding cash transactions by up to two cents to account for the discontinuation of pennies... I just can't imagine that taking more than a few weeks to resolve, surely your political systems in the US haven't become that dysfunctional where this couldn't be fixed that quickly?
I don't buy the SNAP argument because there's already rounding when taxes are applied, and half cents are still legal tender, so you could go into a store, tell them they should have charged half a cent less, and then they'd be in a similar trivial violation of SNAP.
Yeah this is the kind of objection dreamed up by an engineer, who thinks that law is mechanically applied. In reality, if there are no other factors this spends two seconds in front of a judge, who then throws it out with prejudice for wasting the court’s time.
> You see, unlike Debian or other standard OS, Raspberry Pi OS (which I still call Raspbian in my head and likely use in this article multiple times) is designed to be flashed to the SD card directly and doesn’t actually have an installer that can be booted from USB
I had a similar experience. We're mostly Apple at home, but I bought an X1 Carbon reburb from MicroCenter a few years ago to run desktop Linux. It's become one of my favorite pieces of tech. Ultra-light but solid with a nice-feeling keyboard and trackpad.
Yup. I'm seeing this as well in trying to write Solarpunk fiction that has near zero hand waving of technical and economic challenges. I've had to rethink a bunch of everyday stuff that today relies on substantial heavy industry behind the scenes (like toothpaste).
I get what you mean in general, but toothpaste isn't a great example as it's not a necessity.
My wife goes without it for years and has no cavity or gum issues.
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/11/13/businesses-face...
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