On Sat, 08 Jul 2000 10:17:52 EST, the world broke into rejoicing as
Richard Wackerbarth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
> On Sat, 08 Jul 2000, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> > One of the big issues seems to be whether we have just one denominator
> > for a commodity, or many.
>
> > Let each commodity to have its own common denominator, but change this
> > denominator when new transactions make it necessary. The new denominator
> > be a multiple of the old one. Changing a denominator involves
> > retroactively rewrite all existing transactions that involved that
> > denominator.
>
> Although this is functional, I object to re-denomination because
> the auditors want the ledger to match the original transaction
> documents.
>
> Once an entry is properly entered, that entry should never change.
The thing that would legitimately need to change would be the name of
the currency.
Supposing, for instance, the Fed decides that the US Dollar has inflated
too much, and that they need to issue "new dollars" in a 1:100 ratio
for the old ones. That is, for $100 of "old" currency, or "old"
balances, you get $1 in the "new, improved" version.
[Admittedly, this particular scenario is vastly unlikely. Change from
$USD to the currencies of nations that have suffered from hyperinflation
such as Israel, Mexico, Germany, and others, or to the not unusual
scenario of a stock split and the scenario becomes not merely believable,
but a somewhat common occurance...]
In that case, it is likely that we want to rename all the "old"
occurances from being "USD" to being "USD.old" or some such thing,
as _new_ references should reference the commodity as it exists today.
> > Actually, a problem that none of the proposals in this mailing list
> > addresses is the possibility that a commodity mught be bought and
> > sold in units whose conversion factors are irrational.
>
> As I said before, you can have irrational pricing but not irrational prices.
> The ledgers represent inventories. Inventories can be counted.
> Prices are exchange ratios. You trade items in one inventory for items in a
> different inventory. As such, field theory tells us that we will never have
> to deal with values that cannot be mapped onto the rational numbers.
People do _not_ use irrational numbers; supposing they count in radians,
the one situation where it might _appear_ to be an exception, they're
likely basing this on _integer fractions_ of radians, which means that
the unit of measure is an integer fraction that just happens to get
multiplied by Pi so as to make it _appear_ irrational.
> > Can you, for example buy angles in degrees and sell them in radians?
>
> <humor>
> Well, I won't "buy" that angle.
> Where did you buy your degree?
> Radian's already been sold.
> </humor>
>
> For those of you outside the Silicon Hills, Radian Corp was a spinoff of
> Tracor, Inc. here in Austin. They are a leader in environmental monitoring
> and similar engineering.
I don't want to touch this one...
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