M.J. Rose

Take THAT, money! (Plus, a very cool new vocabulary word for us: “ragpickers”) — enjoy the story…

 

 

From Atlas Obscura,

 

Think Kanye’s Bad With Money? This Family Literally Burned $1 Million

by Sarah Laskow

 

“In 1937, one of the wealthiest families in America delivered a suitcase filled with cash to the Treasury Department of the United States, who paid $198,176 to one of the richest families in America, for a pile of money worth as much as $1 million. They didn’t go on a shopping spree, though.

 

In fact, after the Treasury took possession, the Associated Press reported, that cash was “hacked to pieces and burned.”

 

The Treasury did keep one bill—a $500 note that the Treasury had issued in the mid-19th century. It was in better condition than the one in the official Treasury collection.

 

Far from an example of government overreach, this strange incident of money-burning was a canny strategy to make the estate of one Colonel E.H.R. Green even more valuable. It was also a preamble to the demise of one of the greatest currency collections ever assembled.

 

This collection was begun by Hetty Green, the only female tycoon of the Gilded Age. Green was famously tight-fisted with her money—she lived in Brooklyn and Hoboken to avoid paying Manhattan taxes—but found physical bills fascinating (and valuable) enough that she started amassing rare currency, along with regular old money.

 

Although coin collecting had been in vogue for centuries, until the 1940s, collecting paper money was rare. Even then, coin collecting was more prestigious. “Until recently, the derisive term used by coin collectors to characterize those of paper money was ‘ragpickers,’” says Art Friedberg, co-author of Paper Money of the U.S….”

 

For the rest, click here.

 

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A floating gathering of conspiracy theorists!

 

Just imagine being a fly on the wall for this one. It would certainly make for a great author’s people-watching tour…

 

 

From Jezebel,

Sail (Far) Away: At Sea with America’s Largest Floating Gathering of Conspiracy Theorists

 

“Once we’re in international waters, every woman on the ship gets to make love to whoever she wants,” Sean David Morton said, with a wink.

 

It was not entirely clear why we couldn’t have done that already, where we were, sitting immobile on the Ruby Princess, a “grand class” yacht moored in San Pedro, California, an oil refinery and port town just south of L.A. But we were making ready to sail away from our conventional ideas about laws, up to and including the laws of cause and effect.

 

Morton is a radio host, among other things. Here he was one of the lead organizers of Conspira Sea, the first annual sea cruise for conspiracy theorists. While the ship looped from San Pedro to Cabo San Lucas and back, some 100 of its passengers and I would be focused on uncharted waters, where nothing is as it seems. Before we docked again, two of them would end up following me around the ship, convinced I was a CIA plant.
Elsewhere aboard, people’s vacations were already exuberantly underway, the cigarette-browned casino bustling. Those of us in the conspiracy group were crammed into a dim, red-carpeted conference room in the bowels of Deck 6 to hear Morton, a Humpty Dumpty-shaped man with a chinstrap beard and an enormous, winking green ring, explain our mission.

 

“Conspiracy theorists are always right,” Morton told the room. He spoke with the jokey cadence and booming delivery of his profession; he’s basically Rush Limbaugh, if Rush Limbaugh claimed to have psychic powers (Morton practices a form of ESP known as “remote viewing,” which he says he learned from Nepalese monks). It was a bit of a pander, since the room was filled with conspiracy theorists….

 

For the rest, click here.

 

 

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Long term thinking. It seems to be a rarity these days, but these industrious people are all about it…

 

They’re asking the question: Are we being good ancestors?

 

 

The Inventor of the Long Now 10,000 Year Clock Tells the Story of How the Idea Originated
by Lori Dorn

 

In “The Clock of the Long Now” by Public Record, inventor Danny Hillis of The Long Now Foundation explains how the idea originated for a 10,000 Year Clock and what the clock is meant to symbolize.

 

I wanted a symbol of the future, in the same way that the pyramids are the symbol of the past. I wanted to to build something that gave us a sense of that connection and that’s how I started thinking about the clock. …I’m building a clock that will last for 10,000 years.
The clock is currently being built into a Texas mountain. Long Now board member Kevin Kelly wrote about “The Clock in the Mountain” in 2011.

 

The Clock is now being machined and assembled in California and Seattle. Meantime the mountain in Texas is being readied. Why would anyone build a Clock inside a mountain with the hope that it will ring for 10,000 years? Part of the answer: just so people will ask this question, and having asked it, prompt themselves to conjure with notions of generations and millennia. If you have a Clock ticking for 10,000 years what kinds of generational-scale questions and projects will it suggest? If a Clock can keep going for ten millennia, shouldn’t we make sure our civilization does as well? If the Clock keeps going after we are personally long dead, why not attempt other projects that require future generations to finish? The larger question is, as virologist Jonas Salk once asked, “Are we being good ancestors?”…

 

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