Kingdom of Knuffel

I kind of don't live anywhere important like a big city, so homelessness is not super common here. I don't really have good mental tricks for dealing with it. I'll have to think about what you guys said some more.

@jacob: Hah, don't worry, you're not alone in this :') I always wonder "maybe I should've given the money anyway?" It's hard if you really wish you could help, but know they don't want you to actually help them right, they just want a quick fix.

@Akili: Right, then that's why it might be troubling to you. It's really a lot about being observant and quickly deciding if the person, for the lack of better words, is worth to be given the money they're asking for. It's certainly not easy. After a while, by default, I say I don't have cash on me (which might or might not be true). But if I see I wouldn't mind sharing a few coins, I actually dig into my wallet to see.

this is changing the subject but you mentioned coins and it made me start thinking about them, and if countries are going to eventually move away from coinage altogether. On the one hand the practicalities seem like that's the way it would go but on an emotional level, paper money just doesn't seem to have the same reality as coinage and confidence in currency is still something that affects exchange rates and peoples' spending and saving habits so I wonder if coinage will be kept around even if just for that.... and then I realized I don't know anything about finances, really, when it comes to looking at that kind of question, and so if any of you know of a good book to read on this subject please let me know! Or even if you just have an opinion.

I don't think coinage will be gotten rid of in favour of paper money, but like jacob said, there are certain tendencies to get rid of cash altogether. I do very much dislike that idea though... But I don't have any book recommendations on it.

I was trying to look some of this up, and it is so confusing. Apparently there is also something called "cryptocurrency" which has me totally flummoxed. I do not understand what it is talking about at all!

Oh, those are basically an online currency form, it's all based on people agreeing that "hey, let's record our transactions in this way and the computational effort some people invest to make it work is worth something" - to put it in a very very basic and simplified way. It's a big bubble that will probably burst at some point, all these new variants popping up recently. But it's currently a hype topic, since some people managed to accumulate a lot of wealth by investing in the first one of them at the beginning (although it is debatable how many people actually are wealthy because of it now - because a lot of them still just own the cryptocurrency that is supposed to be worth a lot now, but if they started actually trying to sell it for some normal currency, it's not so unlikely that that would make the worth of the cryptocurrency collapse, so...)... So people continue to invest in it for now.
But yeah, unless you find it very fascinating, I wouldn't bother trying to understand it in depth at this point, I doubt it will really be the thing in the future, as some people who are working in that area would like us to believe.

that at least is a clearer explanation that what I could find. Thank you! You are really skilled at teaching.

Thank you :)
Although I admit, I had multiple good professors taslk about it, so the way of explaining it is not entirely my own. I just tried to simplify a bit further for a non-computer-scientist audience :)

and I REALLY appreciate that!

So is this going to be your field, then? Computer science?