I am rereading the Malazan Book of the Fallen series by Steven Erikson. Aren is a city in that world, and weapons made of Aren steel are high quality and hard to break. I was assuming you had just added the “e” to the end of the phrase “Aren steel” to make it sound like a person’s name.

Love the username! I’m rereading the books now, currently in book 7 of the main series but also working through the other novels and novellas from both authors for the first time.

They’re still made and still legal, though because the demand isn’t that high they don’t make a huge quantity. You can get some from your bank upon request, though if they don’t have any on hand you may need to wait for them to get some on your behalf. The main thing needed for $2 bills is popularizing them.

$1 and $2 coins would also be a good idea, honestly, entirely replacing the corresponding bills, like Canada and the eurozone have done, and also eliminating physical pennies like Canada and certain euro countries. But those are harder fights. ($1 coins do already exist, in small quantities, alongside the $1 bill.)

I assume these places will stop taking cards (or impose minimums or surcharges) as soon as the pandemic is sufficiently past, since merchant fees are a significant cost at their cheap prices and low margins. I would usually pay that kind of place in cash especially if I am not buying a large order, unless I don’t have the cash at the moment. But I usually carry cash just like before the pandemic. For things like Starbucks, of course they can eat the card fees no problem so I’d even buy a snack or a flavored water with a card from them.

The biggest benefit of having the cheap pizza cost exactly $1 is/was the convenience factor of not fumbling with having to wait for them to make change and put it away. So they have a task ahead of them to popularize $2 bills before the price goes up to $2.

I visited the official Buckingham Palace shop last month in England. Approximately everything there is still focusing on the Queen. I expect that to change in connection with the coronation.

Whether the example you give is a good thing or a bad thing, it’s not at all exactly this - in that scenario they are deporting non-citizens who have committed crimes to their country of citizenship.

This man is a British citizen born and mostly raised in the UK (although he had spent some years living in Jamaica) where the UK government insisted he was someone else, deported him to Jamaica, incorrectly accused him of using his genuine British passport fraudulently when he returned a few years later, and jailed him for additional years on that basis.

Thanks!

For those of us in GDPR-land who don't want to consent to cookie tracking and who want to object to the many disingenuous claims of "legitimate interest" for the many advertisement and tracking vendors both sites use, that's only marginally better than GBNews. I'm not sure that the Standard's "Reject All" link actually sends the legitimate interest objections to every vendor instead of just declining to offer consent, so first I had an annoyingly long list of "ON" to switch to "OFF" (all of which very implausibly had the exact same list of legitimate interest uses), as opposed to an interminably / infeasibly long such list on GBNews which made me give up and close the tab. And then the Standard hit me with a "register to keep reading" wall.

Grmbl @ how actually GDPR compliant websites are almost as rare as meaningful GDPR enforcement... (And right now I equate UK GDPR with GDPR since there haven't been many changes since Brexit, although I'm in the EU right now.)

Is there a better link that actually lets the general public read and which makes it easy enough to preserve privacy?

It's one single suit with BdB and both city agencies as defendants. Their lawyer probably thought, quite reasonably, that it's simplest and cheapest and therefore best to include all potential defendants where someone could make a plausible nonargument that they should be included for a legitimate non-frivolous reason, even if that argument ends up not winning in court. It prevents DOT or Parks Dept from making the lawsuit slower and more costly by blaming each other and/or BdB and insisting that they be served and joined before resolving the lawsuit.

Also, as a realpolitik practical matter, including BdB in the lawsuit probably helped get the NY Post especially interested in writing about / highlighting her story, which will add pressure on the city to fix the sidewalk faster than otherwise - maybe the extra pressure will get her a quicker and/or better settlement too. The Post quotes her criticizing how BdB ran the city for eight years, and they love to run anti-BdB quotes.

As per the article, she's also suing the city (NYC DOT and Parks Department).

And what about the vast majority of NYC where Bragg isn't the DA? Bragg only oversees prosecutions in Manhattan but the crime problem isn't restricted to that borough. Blaming Bragg doesn't explain the data.