Credit cards are another one of those things that started in our lifetimes, with Diners' Club in 1950, and we are moving relentlessly to a cashless society. Like it or not, it's happening. Bank debit cards are replacing cash and the Duper phones are even worse; just tap the phone (or whatever they do) and the dough is magically transported from one account to another.
There was a time when the US Treasury issued currency with much higher values than the Benjamins of today, with the largest being $10,000 in general circulation. Can you imagine going to a car dealership today and whipping out a wad of thousand dollar bills? I'm not sure they would be recognized as legal tender; even the humble two dollar bill raises a lot of suspicion, but I haven't seen one of those in years. The hundred dollar bill itself may not be long for this world; earlier this year there were some mutterings about abolishing it. Only drug dealers and other criminals have a need for such large bills, don'cha know.
What I like best about cash is that the purchases can't be tracked. Every time I use a debit card I think that this is another little bit of info that goes into the gaping maw of Big Data, retrievable by whatever agency deems appropriate. Behavior patterns can be discerned, but maybe I'm just getting paranoid. I have nothing to hide, right?
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A common campaign promise these days is jobs, and everybody promises to, somehow, create more of them. How are they going to do that, what kind of jobs are they talking about, and where will these jobs be located? Once all the undocumented workers are sent back to their homelands there will be plenty of opportunities in the agricultural and manual labor sectors, that's for sure.
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Living in Chicago it's pretty easy to say something about the weather for the thousandth time, don't you think? At least if you're not talking with the same people all the time, then it can get old. But how 'bout them Bears?
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