Peanut butter is one of the cheapest shelf stable foods, either per calorie or per gram of protein. It’s obviously delicious with some sort of fruit jelly/jam. And the protein in peanuts complements the protein in bread, covers all the essential amino acids.

Spreadable or meltable cheeses are pretty delicious on toast, and can be supplemented with seasonings. I put cream cheese and everything bagel seasoning on my sourdough slices most mornings.

There are also a ton of delicious toppings for open face “sandwiches” or toast:

1. Avocado is a classic for a reason. If avocados are cheap near you, that can be an option.
2. Fresh tomatoes on toast are a classic in Spain for a reason, too.
3. Sardines or other canned fish/seafood, if you like that.
4. Mediterranean spreads like hummus, baba ganoush, muhammara, harissa, etc.
5. Shrimp, like gambas al ajillo or something similar, go really well on toast.
6. Roasted mushrooms

If you’re baking your own bread, you can also try to shape some little bread bowls and fill them with soup. French onion soup takes some time but the ingredients are pretty cheap.

Not all of these options are ultra cheap, but many are flavorful enough that even small portions can work out to be really affordable on a per calorie basis, for stretching that budget with bread.

There are two types of people in the world:

1. Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data

Yeah, it’s a mixing of art styles.

The road, yacht, and bushes all choose not to put very much detail, but the actual cars are all essentially flattened photographs with perfect perspective and angles and shadows.

Not saying that level of accurate detail isn’t possible with hand-drawn comics (see pbfcomics for an artist who is simply amazing at choosing the level of detail appropriate for the joke) but the subtle mismatch just looks wrong at first glance.

Then, the inaccurate details in the exact same comic. It doesn’t seem like one coherent work with one author.

Wasn’t there a guy who would actively remove artist signatures from comics because he considered it “advertising”?

Alcohol definitely interferes with all sorts of stuff, I’m not disputing that. The body prioritizes getting rid of circulating alcohol.

But if you look at the way the body metabolizes alcohol, using alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) enzymes to convert to acetaldehyde, and aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) enzymes to convert to acetate, the process accumulates acetate in the body. And acetate is metabolized in the Krebs cycle.

I don’t know what experiment you’re referring to, but the metabolic pathway that ethanol follows, to acetate, is pretty well established. And that pathway accounts for how the body gets rid of something like 98% of the alcohol it consumes.

As the body gets rid of that poison, it consumes oxygen and releases carbon dioxide, generating energy stored in ATP molecules.

Alcohol has calories. This is basic textbook nutritional science.

Yes, exactly. Even true translations can carry different connotations, and that’s part of what makes translation interesting, that even simple sentences can lose some implied meaning in a direct, correct translation.

Ethanol metabolism does feed into the Krebs cycle and results in about 7 calories per gram. It just passes through some pretty nasty intermediate steps, with acetaldehyde circulating and causing tissue damage in the meantime.

But you can get usable energy out of ethanol.

That monkey doctor was worthless, Dr Hindsight telling them not to do the thing that already hurt one of them, and seeming to do nothing to actually treat the injury.

I’m basically the same age and I would have trouble even wanting to become friends with a 25 year old. Can’t imagine dating or marriage or co-parenting with someone with that level of life experience. Make it 19 and it seems like a completely absurd proposition.

But it depends on what you want out of relationships. If you’re not looking for an equal partnership, a connection at an emotional and an intellectual level, then maybe what I’m talking about wouldn’t deter you.

My personal prices for each:

Live grub: $50

Large raw onion: $25

Carolina Reaper: $100

Century egg: $10

None of these are even $1000 foods, much less $1,000,000 foods.

If you offered me $1 million to eat all four, I’d do it without thinking twice about it.

They mean digital, as in using digits, as in fingers and toes. They’re talking about sticking fingers in your butt.

Deskjobs are usually mental health problems.

But still, usually, less than the mental health issues that blue collar jobs tend to present.

Blue collar/service work gets the worst of both worlds. Shitty people, office politics, and high stress, just like with white collar, but then adding on more physical strain and discomfort, less economic security, and the mental health burden of being less physically safe (including the mental health impact of watching people get hurt or age poorly), and having less social respect.

It’s not even close, in my opinion. Blue collar workers have it shittier, and we should be doing more to improve their working conditions.

Just hand wave away the “how,” if your story is about the person rather than about the laundering techniques. Just say that he has been laundering money and finally built up enough legitimate-seeming wealth that he can hold overseas.

Not every story needs to have an Andy Weir style explanation of the nuts and bolts of how each step progresses. Unless that’s what you want to do, in which case you better start consulting people who really know this stuff.

The amount of money the US has is, IIUC, slightly over $2 trillion.

About $5.5 trillion. Which, through banking, is multiplied as a money supply of about $23 trillion.

Honestly, my take is that you shouldn’t get into the weeds of foreign currency exchange, money supply, etc., in a fictional work unless you already have a strong grasp of the concepts involved. I personally don’t, just some macroeconomics coursework decades ago in college, but I know just enough to see when things don’t look right. If the plot allows for you to hand wave away how it works, you can just model things after existing banking havens throughout post-Bretton-Woods history.

When you deposit physical cash at a bank, the bank accepts the money, and records that in its books to show that your account has a higher balance. The account balance itself is your asset, and the bank’s liability. So when you have an account balance of $1000, that’s the bank owing you $1000, that they have to pay you at any time, on demand. They can pay it to you with physical currency, if you show up to the bank and say you want to withdraw the balance in cash. Or they can honor your demand to pay someone else on your behalf (through a paper check, electronic funds transfer, etc.).

Like if a bank takes the gym bag full of money, what do they do with the US$1 million

They can hold onto it, or deposit it somewhere else, in exchange for their own balance with some other financial institution.

The overwhelming majority of money in the modern system isn’t physical. It’s just records in a ledger: paper in the days of paper records, or digital records in the modern banking world. So although physical cash can move around, on the back end, the banks are mostly dealing with each other in updated ledgers, not physically moving physical currency. I might have a credit card account and a checking account with a bank, and I spend with my card in a way that increases the balance of the credit card, and then use my checking account to pay my credit card balance, and then all that gets resolved without any physical currency changing hands. Including with the merchant, who might accept credit card payments electronically, and then pay their employees through electronic payments as well.

Currency exchange is done by supply and demand. A small country with its own small economy and a floating currency is going to be vulnerable to swings in foreign exchange rates, so that country will likely need to hold a lot of reserves to shore up their own currency value, knowing that they have the foreign currency and gold to be able to trade it for their own currency, and keep the supply and demand for their own currency from completely swinging the value back and forth.

So if it’s a country that just uses dollars, and someone shows up with a bunch of dollars, their deposit helps shore up that bank’s own reserves of physical cash. Or if someone comes in with an electronic transfer of dollars to their account in the bank, that bank now has a higher balance of dollars on its records (recognized by the other financial institutions).

Adding a currency exchange component to this whole thing sounds like an unnecessarily complicated side quest, if you’re just trying to tell a story.

I suppose the country’s currency is hard, or reasonably hard, enough that it can be freely exchanged.

Why wouldn’t it just be another dominant world currency, like the dollar or the euro? In real life, banking havens in other countries still actually keep the accounts denominated in a currency that country doesn’t necessarily control: either pegged to a reserve currency or directly in that reserve currency itself.

as I believe humans to be social and compassionate by nature

It’s best read as part of the broader debate about whether human nature pushes people into being cruel or generous or noble or something else, in the absence of social structure.

It’s not even necessarily commentary on the average person, but whether a power vacuum would enable the worst among us to be even worse than they can be in a highly structured society. Bad people taking power can still happen in a group that is 90% good, if the cruel or evil or narcissistic will take control for their own ends, and the good aren’t successful (or don’t try) in maintaining social control for good.

There was something cool about my 20’s, moving cities, making new friends, dating around, picking up new hobbies and interests. I always had roommates, because it always made more financial sense, but that also had the side effect of having a wider social circle. It was fun and exciting.

But 30-40 was probably my peak fun. I started coasting at work, but was senior/respected enough that I could just mostly be left alone. At work and socially and just out in the world, people took me seriously to where I felt less social pressure, and could prioritize the things that were important to me rather than to other people. That social freedom was pretty liberating. And it didn’t hurt that I was making better money than in my 20’s, especially when accounting for the dual income when I got into a long term committed monogamous relationship in my early 30’s.

So with that newfound social freedom and increased financial and career flexibility, I shifted to a slightly different style of having fun with friends, valuing closeness and time together rather than just a packed agenda of action items each time we got together. We could do weekend trips somewhere around a particular activity (skiing, lounging at a beach, distillery tours), but really building closeness with things like couch/patio time between planned meals or activities.

My 40’s are a different kind of fun, maybe more responsibility, a few more body aches and pains, a few health scares, lots more parenting responsibilities, a little more helping my own parents responsibilities, dealing with more external world nonsense in 2026 compared to 2016, but overall I’m still doing fine on the fun front. My 30’s were the best, though.

This Wikipedia article gives a pretty good writeup of the history.

The traditional method of legal education in the United States was an apprenticeship type model (and going back to England around the time when the current United States was English colonies), where aspiring lawyers would need to find apprenticeships/clerkships under the supervision and mentorship of existing lawyers.

Then during the 1800s, as you mention, schools like Harvard started offering legal education in the university environment, but university programs were competing with the rising professionalization and standardization of the professional schools where practitioners would formally take on many apprentices with a more formal, systematic curriculum of materials for the apprentices to study and do. So by 1900, the majority of lawyers still did not have law degrees from university-affiliated programs.

Around the same time, English universities were working through reforms of how legal education would work, and experimented with 6-year degrees that required no prior bachelor’s degree, or 3-year programs that did require a separate bachelor’s degree.

Throughout all of this, in England and in the United States, there was debate about whether it should be a postgraduate degree or a bachelor’s degree, the extent to which the education should emphasize theory or practical skills, and how long these programs should be, and what the degree itself should be called.

Eventually, after fits and starts, all the different approaches started to merge into a new consensus in the United States by the 1960s, with the support of the American Bar Association: a 3-year Juris Doctor degree that requires a 4-year degree as a prerequisite. Apprenticeship has pretty much fallen by the wayside, with only very few states allowing that pathway as a method of becoming a lawyer, and some states (like California) requiring additional testing to prove competence (a first year exam known as the baby bar exam, then the bar exam), and almost all legal employers choosing not to hire any lawyers who don’t have J.D.s, that anyone who actually wants to practice as an attorney in the United States will generally go to law school in the United States. Some states allow foreign lawyers to sit for the bar exam after only one additional year of education in an American law school (the international LLM), but that’s a fairly niche path, mainly for people in New York who work in international things.

See, e.g., Ted Kaczynski.