I stopped watching Congress after the first 70 seasons.  They kind of jumped the shark in season 71, and it's just all been implausible plot lines since then.

I propose this becomes the new metric for measuring quality in other aspects of life.  For example, which profession produces the most politicians, and is therefore the worst?  Which majors produce the fewest politicians, and are therefore superior?

We're just one legal precedent away from re-creating Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in spectacular 21st century form.

Expect to see the boilerplate for wills start to include lines like "any children conceived after my death".

If you consider the modern British pound to be the same money as that traded back in the 1700's, then arguably, it has already collapsed. (Scroll halfway down, where the US dollar shows a similar loss of value.)

But the pound today is not the same currency as the original one with which it shares its name.

The British Pound originally represented one troy pound of sterling silver back in 1560. Sterling silver is 92.5% pure silver and there are 12 troy ounces in a troy pound.

The pound, of course, is no longer redeemable for 12 oz of silver.  Nor do the shillings which represented this silver circulate.

The pound was on a gold standard going into WWI, but it was officially abandoned in 1931.  The Bretton Woods pound/dollar peg gave it indirect gold convertibility, which ended when the US stopped gold redemption in 1971.  So it has only been a completely fiat currency for about as long as the US dollar.

1. Pardon my shorthand. "Collapse" happens when a currency's real value plummets.  "Failure" happens when a currency is withdrawn, re-issued, or no longer used.  Generally, failure follows collapse as no one wants to trade real resources for worthless currency.
2. Depends on the form collapse takes, and the resulting political order. As Fake John Galt referenced above, one thing always follows the other.  What generally happens is savers are wiped out, holders of useful commodities/land get wealthy, and most of the middle/poor classes suffer greatly through inflation and trade disruption.
3. This is the tough part.  The irony of currency collapse is that preparing for it requires significant investments of pre-collapse currency.  By definition, those with more money can better prepare.

The Main Street guy who tries to time gold or commodity markets will get wiped out.  You can do things like put 10-20% of your savings into physical gold; the long-term strategy is to put your savings into ownership--your house, usable land, productive assets--not paper investments.

The answer wanders into monetary theory a bit. Any currency you keep under a mattress is considered "out of the system", or dead, for the purposes of macroeconomics because it is not being invested in productive projects.

If your society considers gold as money, gold bars you are not lending or spending are dead money the issuers can't replace through printing.  Keynes despised this aspect of gold because he believed it contributed to the Paradox of Thrift.  

Saving money in dead form is an expression of doubt about the stability of investment institutions (banks) and vehicles (bonds).  In a free society, the people act as a check on the currency issuers by choosing to withhold their money from the system... which is why Roosevelt confiscated all American gold in 1933.

Technically, any commodity (silver, salt, iron, etc) you buy with paper money and hoard effectively becomes dead resources.  But money/gold holds high value in small amounts, and is easier to track.

Right.  A fiat currency, in theory, could be maintained forever if the people in charge were responsible and limited the issue of bills above their asset reserves.  In practice, of course, the people in charge are politicians, who act in predictably irresponsible ways whenever they need more money for warfare or welfare.

GLD doesn't trade as money; instead, it approximately tracks the potential value of a theoretical dollar pegged to gold.  The problem is its prospectus includes the clauses that any redemption of GLD shares may be paid out in cash, not physical gold, or redemptions may be suspended at management's discretion.

Every layer between your hands and the underlying physical commodity reduces the value of a redeemable currency.  GLD comes close in theory, but it's not a true gold currency... especially if it settles its physical gold accounts with paper gold contracts.

That was nagging at me as well.  I'm OK with the idea of anachronisms in stylized movies; Luhrmann hit some good notes with pop songs in Moulin Rouge.  But the dialogue seems more out of place than the sub-par hip-hop they plastered over the trailer.

Maybe it's delivered better in context, but that "You always look so cool" line just doesn't evoke the same momentous emotion Fitzgerald gave it in the book.  The point of Gatsby's style was to highlight what people hid underneath, not the style itself.

...then again, I am one of the minority heretics who never liked the original Gatsby in novel form, either. So my opinion should be dismissed out of hand by actual Fitzgerald fans.

It took $1 billion to "help" them?  Why, when I was a boy, we walked 5 miles to school, barefoot, in the snow, uphill (both ways!), etc, etc...

And no one offered to subsidize us!

Kids these days, I tell ya.

From that article (and multiple others Google News linked), it looks more like authorities were trying to sedate, capture and release it. Initial reaction was to cordon off the street and try to subdue the lion.  But it tried to escape the containment, and they shot it as it got near the open street. 

This, I think, was the proper yet unfortunate chain of events.  They didn't shoot the lion immediately on finding it in the city; they tried to capture it.  But once it became a legitimate public safety risk, they killed it rather than risk human life.

Blue Yeti, ignoring the proactive "kill all sharks" thread you originally objected to, surely you don't think it is OK to let a mountain lion roam the streets of Santa Monica?  I can't think of any possible justification local officials could come up with to letting a lion escape into the public, instead of taking the shot.

Ye flipping gods, I hope not.  I may lose my sanity if that kind gets into my house.

One of those "strange but true" facts is that roach swarming behavior actually changes in warehouses and large spaces, versus how they behave in your house with lots of hiding spaces.  But we'll save the in-depth analysis of roach movement patterns for another day.

If he didn't kill a human, great, cart him off to a mountain somewhere.  Let him frighten the joggers and the hippies.

The link you have right now doesn't seem to work, but I assume he wasn't captured after eating someone's kid; if he was, then a bullet to the head would be the better option.

All palmetto bugs die on sight, period.  No reprieve, no mercy.

This may sound brutal to people living "up north", but you would shout the same battle cry the first time you open your silverware drawer and find one of the larger ones camping out on your forks.

And you would redouble the xenocide campaign every time you wake up in the middle of the night feeling a faint tickle on your cheek, and reach for the light...

Great line.  I wonder, when everyone's married, will the government benefits and subsidies to marriage stop?

Well, we're conservatives; we expect human nature to assert itself at all times, but especially once the veneer of civilization is stripped away.

I forget who said it, but the line goes something like "society is just 3 meals away from total collapse".  All you have to do is block entry of food into a major metropolitan area for 4-5 days, or cut off water and sewage for half that time, and you'll see plenty of the worst in people. (And I say this as someone who has seen it, first hand, in the aftermath of devastating hurricanes.)

When disaster strikes, the remaining faith you have will shrink to its smallest spheres: your family, maybe your neighbors--assuming you got to know them beforehand--and possibly your community, if you are lucky enough to have natural leaders in your midst to organize smaller groups of families and neighbors. 

They should live on the lake.  They should teach their kids about the danger of gators at the age of 3, and forbid small children from playing in murky water unsupervised.  And they should keep a loaded shotgun in the house.

"Live and let live" is another trite line hiding a brutal truth.  If the other side won't let live--whether dumb animal or intelligent human--it's your job to revoke the "live" part.

Speaking of which, if a gator makes a meal out of Fluffy, that's not enough reason to call up a dragnet.  But if he did so while encroaching on human development, then you should call up Animal Control, have it captured and relocated.

Little yappy dogs aren't worth shooting over, ever.  YMMV.