I'm finally at peace with the current currency (see previous rant). That's because I finally figured out the true purpose of the new money. It makes sense to me now, why they had to screw it all up, and make it look all goofy-looking. They're trying to foil time-travelers.
Suppose I've got a time-machine, and I go back in time to the 80s, or the 70s, or the 60s or any such time rockin' time period as anyone might be interested in. Then when I go to pull out my money to buy something - the jig is up! Nobody's going to accept those goofy big-head presidents! I'd be detained and questioned, and most likely, I'd be stuck in the grimly-detailed, period loony bin. Far from my time machine escape route. Well and truly screwed.
OH SHIT! I hope they didn't use this angle in Hot Tub Time Machine. I would look like such a "biter." But wait, they couldn't have - who gets into a hot tub with money?
Anyway, I bet what happened was, the U.S. authorities noticed over the years that there would be periodic appearances throughout modern U.S. history of "counterfeit" currency, whose only real defect was a future date on the bill. Otherwise, these bills were a genius reproduction of U.S. currency - pretty much undetectable! And who looks at the date? It's like these "counterfeiters" - whoever they were, clearly some outfit or organization, because their work would appear in spurts widely-separated in time and space throughout the 20th century - were deliberately showing their ass by printing such perfect bills with just the impossible future date on there to stymie the authorities.
Well eventually, the unthinkable became obvious. This wasn't a counterfeiting operation at all! These were real bills - from the U.S. Mints of the future. The U.S. Secret Service (whose job it is to deal with counterfeiters and by extension, whose job it became to deal with time-travelers) finally connected the dots and proved that there was no organized counterfeiting ring at all, just disconnected instances of time-travelers going back in time to take advantage of the favorable exchange rate / currency values between future and past. Traveling back in time to procure tchotchkes. Memorabilia. Anything abundant, considered cheap and tawdry in its own era, but which by the time traveler's era has become rare, scarce - and valuable.
In fact if you think about it, it's pretty obvious that the scarcity of these sorts of items in the present is almost entirely due to the time-travelers themselves. Going back and buying them all up in the past! Then taking them to the future to hoard, gradually letting them trickle out slowly on e-bay. Or the future equivalent.
This is how their whole operation is financed.
Anyway, thanks to these dicks, we can look forward to our own money getting goofier and goofier about every 15 years. A regrettable situation, but I don't see any other way to combat the problem, so I'm at peace with it. Now it's true, this approach won't deter the serious operators, who have already got era-specific bills stockpiled. But at least it will put up a barrier that your petty operators (or "small-timers" as they're called on the anachronomemorabilia dealer circuit) will find it hard to get around.
It's like putting a bike lock on your bike.
2 comments:
You are anything but a biter. Your content is always original. And it is appreciated.
I actually recently was saddened and stopped reading a blog because the person was lifting material. I don't know if the blogger intended it initially, but I pointed it out. The blogger never gave the other web site credit, and now I don't trust anything on that blog to be original.
Thank you, Sarah! Wow. That's a sweet comment, just when I was feeling in need of validation blog-wise.
I do admit to a bit of self-plagiarism from time to time, but that's usually easy to spot!
It's always kind of a letdown to see someone swipe and not give credit. Any time I swipe something from another place that's not me, I always give the link to credit them (usually it's just a video they posted that I wanted to share!).
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