Boing Boing consideres Fox Affiliate article about man saving 816 USD over 65 years news.
Find a penny, pick it up and all day long youâll have a penny.
Compared to some of the stuff I hear from Fox News, I think that is more newsworthy.
If he picked the old ones that arenât debased with zinc but are still the original copper, how much would he get for the metal by weight?
Also, what is a chance that some collector-valued coins of higher market value than $0.01 a piece are in the stash?
It took me a minute to figure out exactly why this post annoys me.
Every single news service in the USA runs human-interest fluff pieces to fill in space and keep people amused. A good chunk of BoingBoingâs content is reposting those fluff pieces, which is fine. But this BoingBoing headline is suddenly acting like thereâs something wrong with that. Why? Because the publisher in this case is a FOX affiliate, and this lets us get in a cheap shot against FOX News, who we rightfully hate becauseâŚthey do cheap, dishonest stuff like this.
And now someone will be along in a minute to explain why Iâm an asshole for making this post.
Did they mention that this was John BoHner, the hi dinky do of the KockBroTeaBagger held US Congress?
Dude is SLOW! We had a âpenny potâ by our front door when all the kids were still at home, and even after non-authorized filching we aggregated about $700 in pennies in 15 years or so.
Iâm not going to be that person, because this article has the feel of âpunching downâ to me
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Preemptively calling yourself an asshole is a dickmove. (Satisfied? 
)
Some people actually do this - buy as many pennies as they can from the bank, separate the old ones, and send the new ones back to the bank - waiting for the (hopefully soon) day pennies are no longer currency and can be melted down.
At current prices, youâd make about 50 cents a pound profit, which means sorting through between 150 and 190 pennies per pound. Sounds like an incredible waste of time if done by hand.
io9 had a post about someone who replaced every use of the word âloveâ in Corinthians with âTimâ. I think todayâs just a slow news day.
You donât have to wait. But you should take care to not get caught; easy if you have the furnace and donât have to outsource the task.
Or incredible fun if you make a Lego Mindstorms (or so) contraption for auto-sorting.
And illegal. You are not allowed to scrap pennies.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/2006-12-14-melting-ban-usat_x.htm
It is illegal to melt pennies, but legal to melt old silver coins like Liberty half dollars. For instance a âMercury dimeâ is now worth a buck.
If he had used those pennies to buy $50 Series E savings bonds, each bond would have been worth $240 dollars.
Or if he had saved 1950âs âwheat penniesâ in uncirculated condition, they would now be worth 40 cents each.
@Michael_R_Smith considers Boing Boing post about Fox Affiliate article about man saving $816 USD over 65 years comment-worthy.
Even with the price of copper being beat up in recent weeks, the metal content of a penny is around $0.017
And donât get me started on what @Brainspore thinks about @Michael_R_Smithâs comment on what @jlw thinks about what Fox affiliates think are newsworthy articles.
Iâve always thought that hoarding pennies like this was a very unhelpful thing to do. We wouldnât have to mint so many pennies every year if people like this werenât keeping them out of circulation. The cost of minting a penny varies from year to year, but is generally about $00.01 so this guy cost the government $816 in unnecessary minting costs over 65 years. This may not sound like much, but, if you add up all the pennies being hoarded by everyone, itâs probably a small but significant drain on the economy. Doesnât sound like something a patriot would participate in. IMO, Fox got the political slant of the story wrong.
