You’re not parsing the entire statute;. The clause “issued by any national banking association, or Federal Reserve bank, or the Federal Reserve System” distinguishes paper money (Federal Reserve notes) from coins coming from the mint. They are not the same. Maybe in a saner monetary system they would be, but because of how paper money developed in the US, they are not.

Sooooo… you’re partly right. The US draws a distinction between coins and banknotes, and 18 USC 333 only applies to banknotes. 332 is only for specifically trying to steal gold or silver out of older coins, which at this point is basically moot because the melt value is already way above face value. 333 applies to all coinage and has “fraudulently” as an explicit element. Basically, as long as you don’t fuck with coins to the degree that it seems like you’ve come up with some scheme to defraud the government (there’s a regulation, for instance, that bars massively changing bills into pennies and nickels just so you can melt them down for the metal value), then you do you with the sharpie or even the penny squisher.

Then, about 18 USC 333… Yes, nominally, anything that you do with an intent to fuck it up so much that the Bureau of engraving and printing is against the plain language of that code. In addition, 475 explicitly bars people from marking up cash to be used an advertisement, presumably also thereby making it unfit for reissue.

However, 333 runs up against a couple of issues. First, is a common law principle of de minimis and the practical realities of enforcement. As you say, it’s not going to be an issue with a single bill unless you get an asshole cop, but even then the asshole cop won’t get anything of significance pinned on you for such an insubstantial violation. Second, and maybe more important in a hypothetical discussion, is the first amendment. Cash is a pretty blatant symbol of the government, the country, the economy, and a million other things. If almost anything about the amount, timing, or manner of the way you defaced the cash could be interpreted as “speech” in a meaningful way, then you’re protected, same as with burning a flag. Pretty much unless you’re trying to burn down a BEP plant or bleach a bunch of singles to reprint as counterfeit 100s (the main reason for the law, AFAIK), a first amendment argument is going to be very easy to make, to the point where it’s effectively not a crime to light your cigar with a piece of burning money.

Knopfler is literally a guitar god who makes every list of the top whatever rock guitarists. A few singles got quite popular at Dire Straits’s peak, but it’s loose to the point of being misleading to use “pop” as a modifier here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPnZhKRtZ_U

Do what? Write with cheap but decent fountain pens?

For text, they kind of already are.

Each agent was given a name, personality traits, a role such as conflict mediator or resource strategist, and an overarching goal for its “life” in a shared town… By the end, each simulated world had undergone its own shift in language. The world inhabited by copies of OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 model, for example, compressed speech, removing grammar and shortening messages. “Friendly voltage counted. If the handle needs your mouth, it dies anyway,” one message read.

A twinkie is cream-filled sponge cake sold everywhere, but most bought eaten by boomer and Gen X as kids, or as roadtrip garbage.

Toaster Strudel is another processed American special, but it’s better. A frozen flaky pocket pastry with a jam of some sort inside, suitable to be “cooked” in a toaster. Unlike “pop tarts” which are more biscuit-like and shelf-stable, you really need the toaster for a toaster strudel, but your efforts will be (modestly) rewarded.

“Sorry, we were just confused by this very administration’s scheme to import tons of bribery beef!”

BTTF3 would just be the mid 1920s, which we haven’t seen yet, so that’s… something… right?

Absolutely. Maybe the “shitpost” part of this is suggesting that it’s in any way a tough choice.

Yeah, this is kinda funny. Doctor Doctor is definitely pricier and very likely better than Dr Pepper, and the label on the soda fountain basically says as much. You need to get some Dr. Thunder up in there to make the meme really work.

Man, people clown on George Lucas when he’s left without constraints, but he’s got nothing on Roddenberry except that the OT hit big enough that we got to see it. Roddenberry was deeply involved in the story of TPM, including the novelization.

My name is James Tiberius Kirk. Kirk because my father and his male forebears followed the old custom of passing along a family identity name. I received James because it was both the name of my father’s beloved brother as well as that of my mother’s first love instructor [insert Spock raised eyebrow here]. Tiberius, as I am forever tired of explaining, was the Roman emperor whose life for some unfathomable reason fascinated my grandfather Samuel. This is not trivial information. For example, the fact that I use an old-fashioned male surname says a lot about both me and the service to which I belong. Although the male-surname custom has become rare among humans elsewhere, it remains a fairly common thing among those of us in Starfleet. We are a highly conservative and strongly individualistic group. The old customs die hard with us. We submit ourselves to starship discipline because we know it is made necessary by the realities of deep-space exploration. We are proud that each of us has…"

And so it goes. The basic premise is that the enlightened Starfleet officers we all know and love are actually philosophical luddites and prudes, semi-exiled from earth because space is the only place their weird attitudes offer any value to human society. Not a terrible concept, really and one that other sci-fi has explored to varying degrees, but way weirder than anything collaboratively-produced Star Trek would imply, and reading between the lines it sounds like Roddenberry is almost apologizing for what Star Trek had to be in order to get made at all.

It’s not really a thing, at least legally at any statistically significant scale. Economic migration is one of the great issues of our time because it’s hard to do that anywhere.

It’s gotten more difficult in many places since the tiny percentage of Americans who say they’d move out of the country has turned into a slightly less tiny percentage, but you can do your family history to see where your most recent immigrant ancestors came from, and then see if that country’s laws permit you to get a passport or otherwise have an easier path. That doesn’t really make it cheap, but it does mean you might have somewhere to go where being broke won’t get you sent back to the US. The process itself is also usually only “cheap” compared to arranging some other means of immigration.

If you are fairly young and have a somewhat neutral North American accent, there are still programs of varying respectability across east Asia that will let you get work as an ESL teacher.

Then, they’re hardly the type of places that will make you miss the US, but the gulf states have had their guest worker economies rocked by the Iran war, and work permits for jobs worth doing might be easier to get than usual.

If you think the French military would be better than your current situation, and you are a man under 40, and you can physically make it to France, you can still join the Foreign Legion like you’re a side character in a damn Tintin comic or something.

If things are really bad, you can try to claim asylum somewhere, but unfortunately most of the places willing to accept that someone is politically oppressed in the great and free USA to the point of permitting an asylum claim are likely to be tough places for an American to make a new start.

Finally, I suppose there’s always just buying the cheapest international ticket you can find and overstaying your visa, bringing us full circle to undocumented economic migration. Imagine the desperation one must feel to take those risks.

True, although they managed to rework them into the enlisted uniforms for Wrath of Khan and beyond (ctrl-F “ENLISTED CREW UNIFORMS”), and those are perfectly fine for background characters.

Very cool. Exactly in the spirit of the post. I’d only just learned about passive backplane designs on retro machines too. Thanks!

Very possible, and you’re right that nothing will be the same, but America will be a rich and powerful country for a good while yet, and I imagine that after a (very hypothetical) generation of good behavior, many countries would be happy to revisit some of the arrangements that worked for 60+ years post WW2, or at the very least stop specifically planning around how to do without the US like they are forced to do now.

I realize it’s a low bar, but Southlake really is

the

worst

Texas

suburb.

I think you’re being a little generous here. He is all over the place over the years, and kind of just doesn’t care. Whatever was the last version of it that flitted through his head was what he’d claim he always intended. Our friend George is also very much NOT a proponent of the death of the author.

Maybe, but what’s leaked from the story treatments did not inspire a ton of confidence. I guess it might have been more thought-provoking?

Not permanent, but it’s gonna be a while this time. US foreign policy regarding its allies used to be predictable enough that they could make long term plans and expect things that were patently useful to both sides would not be indiscriminately torpedoed. Now, you can mostly hope that the Democrats are on board with that as a broad philosophy, though they’re navigating populist waters that could get rocky with isolationism, but right now the other party in a closely matched two-party system can’t even be trusted not to tweet the economic system into existential peril or threaten literal invasions of allies, to say nothing of their simply being quite bad at efficient governance or diplomatic messaging.

America’s allies will welcome any Democratic administration, and anything that can get better for the duration of one probably will (e.g. Visas, retaliatory tariffs, etc.), but diversifying from the dollar as a reserve currency, building trade networks that can minimize exposure to American political volatility, and even exploring security arrangements that imagine post-NATO scenarios, all that is going to continue unless we see a good two decades or more of non-insane foreign policy from both US parties. Not even humane or optimal, just not batshit crazy.