Some things I've learned from moving.

1) Get rid of your crap. - I've lived in the same place for 20+ years.  The amount of crap you can accumulate in that period is unbelievable.

2) Know where your stuff is. - I've managed to acquire multiple instances things no one will ever need more than one of; 3 offset screwdrivers, 4 sets of jeweler's files, 2 popcorn popers and I don't know how many nut drivers of various sizes.  I wound up in this situation by needing an item and not knowing where it was and simply buying a new one.

3)Live out of boxes. - Rounding up the boxes and putting my shit in them has been one of the more difficult parts of this move.

I don't know how this is going to turn out financially, selling my crap versus the expense of having it hauled may end up costing me money or leaving some extra in my pocket.  I guess I'll find out.

American Money.

I'm not going to talk about the shortcomings of fiat money, U.S. monetary policy or why Keynes was an assbag.  Plenty of others have done that far better than I could.

I am going to go on about the design flaws in physical U.S. currency.  This will all be old news to any foreigner who has traveled here, so you guys might as well just read an older post.

As any foreigner traveling in the U.S. can tell you, our money is confusing.  The notes are all the same color and size and the physical dimensions and apparent materials of the coins tell you nothing of their value.  The reasons for this all make sense historically but who wants to learn the history of a foreign countries money when traveling.  We just want to pay for our stuff and get on.

Let's take a look at the coins arranged by size.

This is not the correct denominational order.  So, lets show the color.  The world has a history of the values of metals being copper<silver< gold, so lots of countries use alloys resembling those metals to denote their coins.

 

But not the U.S.  The above is still not correct. 

Now let's look at them in the correct order.

We have .01, .05, .1, .25, .5 and 1.  They are labeled, stupidly, in prose, and sometimes in terms only an American or maybe, a Canadian would understand, for a couple of them. "one cent", "five cents", "fifty cents" and "one dollar" are as bad as it gets.  But, some time in the past some jackass at the bureaucracy of money designing decided to use colloquial terms on the coins.  No one should expect a foreigner to understand "one dime" and "quarter dollar".

Now to the notes.  In most of the world the notes are different colors and sizes.  Most tourist have stated that they prefer it this way.  I agree with them about the color, but I still prefer a uniform size, to make it easier to arrange things in my wallet.

You don't need multiple sizes to accommodate the blind.  You can just clip corners.

$100, Two diagonal corners clipped.
$50, two corners adjacent on the long side clipped.
$20 two corners adjacent on the short size clipped.
$10 three corners clipped.
$5 all corners clipped.
$1 stop making them and go to a coin like every dollar denominated country in the world.

This even leaves room for them to inflate and reissue $500 and $1,000 notes again.

What really sucks is that they have recently redesigned the currency and didn't fix any of these problem.  Whoever made those decisions deserves to get eaten by zombies.