(image from Getty Images)

Happy Valentines Day! We’re back with another Can’t Let it Go – here are the stories we’ve been thinking about this week.

Adios, Penny?

JASON: The decades-long effort to kill the lowly penny may have finally hit it’s crescendo. President Trump signed an executive order this week (his favorite thing to do) eliminating the penny. It seems that every few years over my entire life this debate pops up and then hits some sort of brick wall. Trump’s executive order is probably completely constitutional, unlike some of the others he’s been signing over the past few weeks.

The penny hit the DOGE radar because it reportedly costs about 3 cents to make a penny and 13 cents to make a nickel. The penny is also not made of copper, but made of zinc, so cue the zinc lobby. The AP quoted the Farmers’ Almanac from 1989 as saying:

“Only tradition explains our stubborn attachment to the penny. But sometimes traditions get ridiculous.”

Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the Netherlands have all dropped pennies from circulation over the past decade. So hoard them while you can. The final days of pennies in circulation may be coming to a close.

Monkey Business!

NIKKI: Sri Lanka, an island nation about the size of West Virginia, with a population of 20 million people, was without power Sunday. Yes. The entire nation. (Hopefully there were no American football fans). And how did this happen? A monkey. A MONKEY. Sri Lankan energy minister Kumara Jayakody said that one monkey acting alone made contact with a grid transformer “causing an imbalance in the power system.” I’m not an electrical engineer (although I did spend this week listen to the House debate the South Carolina Energy Security Act) but I feel like it might be time to rethink the infrastructure there.