Introduced circa 1962 by Lyman Metal Products, the Turnpike Toll Gun allowed drivers to shoot quarters and nickels into toll baskets. I imagine that, nowadays, whipping one of these things out at a toll booth could get you in trouble. But it's still possible to pick one up on eBay if you gotta have one.
The New York Post has an interview with the performance artist who calls himself "Capitalist Man." His gimmick is that he carries around a see-through briefcase, which he claims contains $500,000 in hundred-dollar bills, and he's trying to find someone willing to buy it for a million dollars.
The price tag, he says, is "$500,000 for the cash, $500,000 for the concept." Any interested buyer gets to examine the bills before purchase.
Capitalist Man says that if someone does buy his briefcase full of money, his profit will go entirely to charity. But so far, he has no takers.
The minimum wage machine allows anybody to work for minimum wage. Turning the crank will yield one penny every 3.24 seconds, for $11.10 an hour, or NY state minimum wage (2018). If the participant stops turning the crank, they stop receiving money. The machine's mechanism and electronics are powered by the hand crank, and pennies are stored in a plexiglas box. The MWM can be reprogrammed as minimum wage changes, or for wages in different locations.
So, if this is installed in a museum, do people actually get to keep whatever money they get from it? I'm pretty sure some people would stand there cranking it all day.
This had to hurt. As far as I can tell, they never did find the lost money.
I wonder if Doug faced any kind of punishment. Though arguably it's the mother's fault for storing such valuable financial documents in a laundry basket.
In 1936, banks invented “the Incassomat” or “robot cashier”, a machine to facilitate deposit making and withdrawals, to improve record keeping and reduce human errors in transactions. Soon, banks piloting it realized the cost of operating it was too high compared with the benefits of error correction.
Back in 1907, banks had run out of U.S. gold coins because depositors had withdrawn them all, fearing a recession. So a bank in Baker City, Oregon, having access to gold from a nearby mine, decided to print up its own gold coins. It stamped them with the phrase "In Gold We Trust" to differentiate them from official currency. Which immediately made them a collector's item.
However, government agents soon showed up and destroyed all the existing coins and the dies, since private minting of currency is, of course, illegal. I'm not sure if any of the coins survived.
Here is an account of a bold check-kiting scheme that probably would not be possible nowadays. As with many of these crimes, it sounds like it was more work than making an honest living.
Recently filed campaign contribution reports reveal that Ana Lisa Garza, who primaried unsuccessfully to be the Democratic candidate for a seat in the Texas state house, received more than half her campaign contributions in the form of frozen "deer semen straws" — which came to an estimated value of $51,000.
ABC7 News explains that down in Texas "deer semen has been a popular way to support political and charitable causes for years." This is because deer semen straws can fetch thousands of dollars within the deer-breeder community. And so, they've become a form of currency.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.