I like my neighborhood.

On my way walking back from the diner, one of the churches I pass had a petting zoo, and was change ringing, and the other church was giving out free hot chocolate and homemade cookies, bars, chocolates, and the like, made by their members who like baking.

For the record, I like change ringing better than I like melodic ringing. (For those who don't know, "change ringing" is playing the bells on a church in a mathematical pattern of permutations, rather than in a melody.)

Oh, and the person sitting next to me in the diner had just found out that his cancer had shrunk by 40%, and was feeling pretty well, and ate an entire order of Eggs Benedict, which, as anyone who's been on chemo could tell, is HUGE.

So, yeah. Good news at the diner; change ringing and hot chocolate on the walk home. It's a good place to live.

How bad would the "fiscal cliff" actually be, really?

Honestly, the "disaster" of the fiscal cliff looks a lot better than a lot of the alternative options people are suggesting. . .

I mean, what are the effects? Slightly higher taxes on the wealthiest Americans, about $2000 a year more in taxes on people who are doing about as well as Lis and I are, about $400 a year more on folks who are really struggling.

Major cuts to the defense budget -- which the Pentagon is basically okay with, so long as we can get the heck out of wars. Major cuts to discretionary spending.

The parts which hurt are the discretionary spending, and the $400/year on struggling families. Honestly, I'm fine with the rest of it -- and it's the rest of it that actually saves money.

Getting rid of the dollar bill

Congress is once again considering getting rid of the one-dollar bill, and it's about time. Our coinage is ridiculous at this point. We really ought to get rid of the dollar bill, the penny, and the nickel.

When we came up with our currency, the penny was the smallest coin we chose to have. And its buying power was about what a quarter is today. So, originally, we thought that the smallest amount of money that it was worth considering was a quarter. We'd do fine getting rid of everything below the quarter. This is what the cafeteria at Lis's work does; this is what the restaurant I used to work at did. And we did fine. There is no reason to deal with pennies, nickels, or even dimes.

(Why do we still have pennies? Because of the zinc lobby. Seriously. Pennies are mostly zinc, and the zinc lobby doesn't want to give up their major market.)

Now, down to dollar coins. Let's discuss video games.

The first video game shipped to bars and so forth was "Pong", in 1972 which cost 25 cents a play. That was the price point of pinball games at that point, too. The buying power of a quarter in 1972 was about $1.38 in today's money.

So, if coin-operated video games (which DO still exist, to an extent) cost a dollar a play, it'd still be a deal. And, for that, we'd need dollar coins.

The only argument I've ever heard in favor of dollar bills is that you can stuff them into strippers' garter belts. However, the dollar being stuffed into a strippers' garter belt was already a thing by the early Seventies -- and the buying power of a dollar then was similar to the buying power of a five today, which means that it is high time that strippers started getting paid in fives instead of singles. Just sayin'.