or teach them that it’s relatively easy to pass small amounts of counterfeit currency at businesses you intend to never return to
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100 fake pennies $3.49. 100 real pennies $1.00. There is a lesson there somewhere. Both are a choking hazard
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Nah, they are too small to choke on unless you’re really small. I got a mis- colored penny as evidence…
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One of the reviews on Amazon: “looks real fooled a lot of strippers”
That dude is going to get a stiletto heel to the head some day.
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Come to think of it… I dimly remember hearing a story about promo flyers from Sennheiser in the late 1970ies (?) that looked like 100 DM-bills, with the guy on the banknote wearing headphones. Which were printed in red, the note itself was blue ink on white paper. Allegedly some of them wound up in the red light district of Hamburg.
It’s mildly plausible; I remember the effect from my darkroom days before photography went digital. If you had the red light on you couldn’t see anything printed in the same colour.
The same effect is used in areas with drug problems; under a blue light it’s difficult to see any veins.
So yeah, depending on the colours of the imprints and the ambient lighting, this might work.
Doesn’t seem advisable though, for various reasons.
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Maybe teaching kids to spell is a good place to start 
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That’s hardly fair.
Fake hundreds are easily the most cost effective way to teach your kids ‘money mule’; which is their way into a career in an important(if deliberately unassuming) part of the financial services sector.
The savings look even better when the econ BA required to get into more highbrow monetary movement will run you north of $100k!
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I was 10 or 11 years old the first time I saw a $100 bill. Glad we’re teaching children that it’s all about the Benjamins.
With inflation going on for decades perhaps we should drop the penny and switch to a dollar coin and bring the $500 bill into circulation?
Depends on what you want to do. Saving is no way to build up wealth; for that, you need to invest your money. But it is a way to build up a safety buffer, so you’re not completely hosed if your fridge dies or you lose a tire.
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I’m feeling improtant right now!
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It’s really much less comprehensible with coins: it’s not like every entry is a numismatic masterpiece, especially the ones that have been through the wringer a few times in the course of use; but coinage is generally well made enough to have that very pleasing feel of metallic precision to it. A little bit of heft(perhaps appropriately, the 1 pound coins are gorgeously weighty) plenty of tactile and visual fine detail, often a pleasing color(I am a sucker for copper’s unique(as far as I know; any other coppery-colored metals?) look; some of the alloys are fairly pleasing as well); and, while they are unfortunately confined to more expensive coins the bimetallic ones(like the 1 and 2 euro coins) are always cool.
You get none of that with some low end injection molding of vaguely metallic-ish glitter plastic, lightweight, crude detail level, etc.
(All that said, fake coins do have a purpose in early childhood education: if your math curriculum has a ‘look at the relevance!’ angle where they have kiddo doing arithmetic operations on pieces of their local currency you need appropriate props; and while real coins are cheaper upfront, they tend to wander pretty quickly by virtue of being objects of known value accepted for goods and services almost anywhere. Imitations certainly don’t escape attrition indefinitely, kids excel at losing small bits; but being less aesthetically pleasing and of essentially zero value doesn’t hurt their chances of making it back into the supplies bin.)
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An ethical journalist links to their sources, dontchaknow. 
Did… did you miss the detail that you can just use 349 real pennies for the price of 100 fake ones? That was the joke…
I’m not so sure @frauenfelder thinks it’s a “terrible thing”, he’d probably agree stacks of fake $100s are useful in some cases (I think the boingers had fake $100s as a recommended Xmas gift a few years ago), rather the concept of teaching kids about savings with fake money is ridiculous, and of course there’s the misspelling that adds humor to the whole idea.
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