It’s been widely noted that the national debt clock, erected by NYC real estate magnate Seymour Durst to protest the now-quaint US$2.7 trillion debt in 1989, has run out of digits, and that “[a]s a short-term fix, the digital dollar sign on the billboard-style clock near Times Square has been replaced with an integer—the ‘1’ in $10 trillion” (AP).
Before:
After:
Of course, the Y2K-like ramifications of this aspect of the skyrocketing US national debt will be pervasive, so a more systemic and historically befitting solution would be the creation of an entirely new character, the trollar sign, that could be deployed with a single keystroke (assuming that a small portion of the failed $700 billion bailout fund could be set aside to buy everyone futurofitted keyboards):
The ‘S’ element sinks lower than it ought to on purely aesthetic grounds, for obvious reasons.
An alternative and more distinct form—to avoid confusion with the soon-to-be-deprecated dollar sign—would be the visually jarring trouble-u, named in honor of the Worst President Ever:
(Knocked together using Christian Schwartz’s Bau Bold; he bears no responsibility for the fact that these proposals are butt-ugly.)
If a keyboards-for-all (“K4A”) bailout program isn’t viable, an alternative approach could be a federally subsidized program (like the TV converter box coupon program) to distribute a single-purpose peripheral similar to a numeric keypad, based on the legendary ergonomic keyboard for pirates:
Manufactured in the USA, naturally, as part of a high-tech job-creation program.
Why settle for a kludge when a monument is needed?
It’s been widely noted that the national debt clock, erected by NYC real estate magnate Seymour Durst to protest the now-quaint US$2.7 trillion debt in 1989, has run out of digits, and that “[a]s a short-term fix, the digital dollar sign on the billboard-style clock near Times Square has been replaced with an integer—the ‘1’ in $10 trillion” (AP).
Before:
After:
Of course, the Y2K-like ramifications of this aspect of the skyrocketing US national debt will be pervasive, so a more systemic and historically befitting solution would be the creation of an entirely new character, the trollar sign, that could be deployed with a single keystroke (assuming that a small portion of the failed $700 billion bailout fund could be set aside to buy everyone futurofitted keyboards):
The ‘S’ element sinks lower than it ought to on purely aesthetic grounds, for obvious reasons.
An alternative and more distinct form—to avoid confusion with the soon-to-be-deprecated dollar sign—would be the visually jarring trouble-u, named in honor of the Worst President Ever:
(Knocked together using Christian Schwartz’s Bau Bold; he bears no responsibility for the fact that these proposals are butt-ugly.)
If a keyboards-for-all (“K4A”) bailout program isn’t viable, an alternative approach could be a federally subsidized program (like the TV converter box coupon program) to distribute a single-purpose peripheral similar to a numeric keypad, based on the legendary ergonomic keyboard for pirates:
Manufactured in the USA, naturally, as part of a high-tech job-creation program.