I mean, presumably fractions of a dollar still exist as a concept even if the coins don’t, so if you’re selling something that someone might buy in cash, one could just set the sticker price so that the final price plus tax ends up as a round number, essentially including tax when deciding on price and then taking it out again when making the labels, if one wanted to do that.

Suppose you want to buy something that costs a quarter, and what you have is 3 dimes. If there isnt a 5 cent coin, this creates a situation where you have enough money, but making exact change isnt possible, which while not impossible to deal with is bothersome. If we moved to only dimes and no quarters or nickels, it would never make sense to make a price end in 5 cents, so any price would be a multiple of 10 cents and change can always be made. Alternatively, if you get rid of dimes and nickels but keep quarters, then it doesnt make sense to charge a price ending in something other than .00, .25, .50, or .75, and so you can always make change for those prices with the coins one would have.

Human psychology hasn’t changed during that time, so the same kinds of tricks or weakness that can drive a population into that mode of thinking still work today, if the details around them are adapted for some modern culture. If anything, it might be slightly easier, given those trying to achieve it have historical examples of what is and isn’t effective.

Eh, in this specific case I don’t think china’s economic system has anything to do with it, I think it’s more just making fun of Trump’s ineptness at dealing with a rival power.

ornithopters arent exactly new

It’s not really true that they have no ethics though, if it was, it’d be a simpler problem, because they’d presumably just care about reducing unpleasant consequences to themselves and as such a legal deterrent should be effective. The issue is that they have different ethics, which are misaligned with everyone else’s and so result in conflict when they stubbornly refuse to do something that everyone else perceives as a no-brainer. It isn’t like the church gets some material gain out of keeping confession secret.

To be fair, the issue isn’t so much the person admitting things being protected by being part of the church, but if a third party not associated with law enforcement can be compelled to say to said law enforcement about the things said to them. Honestly I think I get the arguments on both sides of this one, it’s not great to legally compel people to say things, especially when saying those things is directly in violation of their sense of ethics, and it’s also not great to just not do anything when made aware of something like child abuse. I think that a law like this is unlikely to help much though: if the church caves, then it seems unlikely that people would be willing to admit to these things anymore anyway, at least to priests, and if they don’t, these guys seem to believe that the consequences of following the law are worse than breaking it, and so it seems unlikely to do much more than occasionally send a priest to jail when it can be proven that they were told of something and didn’t report it.