Pennsylvania pounds? Oh, sure, those are going to be a real stable store of value.
You could do worse. The current exchange rates is $600/Pennsylvania pound.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/PA-114-BEN-FRANKLIN-5-POUND-NOTE-MAY-1-1760-PCGS-20-VF-VERY-RARE-WLM7293/173686343753?hash=item2870834849:g:QPYAAOSweRdcD7yz&autorefresh=true
Clearly not by popular demand, here's the rest of the story.
Aside from enriching the widow and her son and perhaps a few corrupt politicians, Fort Billingsport didn't accomplish much. It was built by Spring 1777, cannons pointing South to stop the British from moving a fleet up the Delaware. In late 1777 the Brits wisely took their ships up Chesapeake Bay, and circled around to take Philadelphia by land from the West. From their Philadelphia base, The British captured Fort Billingsport without a fight a few weeks later. It had no cannons pointing towards Philadelphia. There are historical markers honoring the Continental Army officers who successfully evacuated the fort.
The Fort was back in business for the War of 1812, and with its sister forts deterred any attempt to attack Philadelphia, still the center of the national economy. Instead, the British headed into the Chesapeake Bay region again, where they burned down a largish white house in a backwater village, and then took a few potshots at Fort McHenry, inspiring a lawyer and wannabe lyricist but causing little damage. The young nation survived.
In 1834 the Fort property was sold by the United States to Joseph Gill for $2000.
Today, an acre or so is a playground, the rest is a petroleum tank farm, with a tanker dock and a freight train yard, all serving local refineries. That's why the playground is so perfect: kids can watch freight trains coupling and decoupling, and if they're lucky might even see a tanker docking.
That's interesting. For some reason, the 500 page pdf wasn't something I was able to fit into my reading list.
Shorter version: https://paulsboronj.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/A_Brief_HIstory_of_Fort_Billingsport.pdf
Also there's a town history page. "In 1811, there were three houses, two stores and two shoemakers in the town." https://paulsboronj.org/general-info/history/
First federal land purchase just seems kind of sad, even by the often-sad standards of historical markers.
I mean, no disrespect, dude. I'm sure it's a perfectly fine tank farm.
R>G, pitfalls of globalization, whatever.
as recently as early 2017, luxury goods bought in China cost 21% more than their global average. [...] Chinese luxury spending abroad reached about $70 billion in 2018, according to Bain & Co., representing nearly a quarter of the global luxury goods market.
[...]
During her undergraduate years, from 2014 to 2017, "my friends and I would go [luxury] shopping every one or two weeks," Zhu said. "I think we were probably spoiled because our parents would give us a lot of money."
[...]
the Tory Burch store recently invited wealthy clients to an event complete with mimosas, cocktail waiters and an artist to paint miniature portraits of guests with their new purchases. Mandarin-speaking shoppers spent the afternoon snapping photos of one another to share on WeChat, champagne flutes raised above tastefully subtle new purses.
[...]
"They aren't immigrants in the traditional sense," Liou said. "They've established themselves [abroad] in some way, such as education at Western institutions or investments in Western countries."
[...]
"Now that China is trying to level the playing field, it doesn't pay to purchase those watches here. The price is often more or less the same," the luxury consultant said. "Now they are shifting to focus on the local market."
On topic because, IDK, shady real estate deals or something.
It would be difficult to come up with a more crashingly obvious right-wing name than "Tory Burch". (Possibly "Joseph Tyree Sneed III" is the only contender?)
Anyway, I've noticed that most of the women with obviously expensive winter coats are either old or Asian. If people have enough money to send their kids to college in America, they have enough money to wrap them in an expedition-quality parka against almost-freezing temperatures.
I actually misread that as "Tory Brunch", which possibly comes out ahead.
This sounds like a rational kind of procedure right?
The poll will be conducted from 6:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. every day this week, with the aim of collecting 15,000 samples from a pool of more than six million phone numbers. The KMT poll will only include landline phones, in contrast to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which incorporated cell phones into its primary poll.
The survey questions are divided into two parts. Eighty-five percent of the final result will be based on the approval rating of each of the five KMT candidates compared to those of President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) of the DPP and independent Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), who has yet to announce his candidacy. How each KMT candidate matches up against the other four will account for the other 15 percent.
The winner of the party's primary will be announced next Monday (July 15)
Well, Fort Billingsport hasn't exactly prospered over the centuries, but most of the other participants are doing well.
Widow Paul has the town and its high school named after her family. Paulsboro High School was featured in the Ben Affleck movie, Jersey Girl.
The possibly corrupt New Jersey delegates live on. In ascending order, Francis Hopkinson has an elementary school named for him (as does Fort Billingsport); John Witherspoon has a Middle School; Abraham Clark has a High School, and a township; and Richard Stockton had Richard Stockton College, which was recently promoted to Stockton University.
But the big winner has been the national debt. The new nation borrowed the purchase price, so on July 5, 1776, the national debt was 600 Pennsylvania pounds. By 1790 it was over $70 million, and played a supporting role in Hamilton!. Now it's $22 trillion. Following LIFO, the original debt has been refi'd a few times but has not yet been paid off.
Even if you can get $600/Pennsylvania£ from collectors, that only gets you $360,000. So, yeah, the land is still the better value store.
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Speaking of £-denominated spacetimes, I mentioned this obliquely before, but: my wife and I are going to be in London again during the upcoming week. If anyone wants to do a meetup, we're available for hanging out from Friday the 13th to Tuesday the 16th of July. I realize this is last minute and we just missed your last meetup, so not a big deal if this doesn't happen.
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Speaking of meetups, anyone in Amsterdam from the 11th to the 24th? I've already reached out to Martin W who sometimes comments here.
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The one in the nether regions or the one in Ohio?
I'm going to the nether regions.
6, 7: Both the sadness and the tank farm are extremely on-brand for New Jersey.
The possibly corrupt New Jersey delegates live on. In ascending order, Francis Hopkinson has an elementary school named for him (as does Fort Billingsport); John Witherspoon has a Middle School; Abraham Clark has a High School, and a township; and Richard Stockton had Richard Stockton College, which was recently promoted to Stockton University.
Witherspoon has a lot more than that named after him, in his capacity as father of the Presbyterian Church in the US, and also as president of Princeton University. Conservative elements within Presbyterianism keep naming things after him, most recently a college in South Dakota.
I had to look that up. They have a faculty that would fit in a minivan.
Absurd nitpicking: this "first federal purchase" probably would not have felt of any historical significance at the time. The Continental Congress had been making purchases pre-Declaration as part of organizing the war, probably including land, and this transaction would probably have gone through indistinguishably had the Declaration been delayed another week or four.
The linked document notes that the actual title transfer was to the names of the Congress's two treasurers, not the United States, showing how jury-rigged everything was legally, and presumably remained for some time.
I looked in an LOC archive and found the Congress started issuing letters of credit to pay for defense as early as June 1775. (They named those two men treasurers in the same resolution, on condition they put up $100,000 surety bonds.)
I'm curious what the first purchase of the post-Constitution United States Government was.
The Lady Garden State brought to you by Bic.
Both the sadness and the tank farm are extremely on-brand for New Jersey.
Yeah, and everybody knows you try to avoid stopping at a NJ tank farm, because they don't let you fill your own tank so it's always a huge time-sucking hassle.
Stuck on the idea of a tank farm as being somewhere where you grow tanks. Do they roam around in fields, or sprout from the ground?
They both sprout from the ground and roam around on rails.