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Best Buy Has Man Arrested for Using $2 Bills
An anonymous reader writes "Mike Bolesta of Baltimore thought he would protest Best Buy's not-so-great customer service and pay his bill with 57 $2 bills. For his trouble he got to spend some time in the county lock-up." From the article: "..Bolesta was contacted by the store, and was threated with police action if he did not pay the [installation] fee he was told before did not exist. As a sign of protest, Bolesta decided to pay using only $2 bills, which he has an abundance of because he asks his bank for them specifically. Unfortunately for him, the cashier did not seem to understand that the $2 bill is indeed legal US tender, since the bill itself is not often used. After rudely refusing to take the money, the cashier accepted the bills, only to mark them as though they were conterfeit."
consider this off-topic, but does anyone know if postage stamps are considered legal tender? cause i would love to pay people in postage stamps and have them be forced to accept it
[n/c]
He may have been factually incorrect in places, but do we need the name calling? After watching the dollar v. euro for the past couple of years, I'd say concerns about currency devaluation in America are valid. As long as we have our massive trade deficit, things aren't getting any better. Further, if OPEC decided to make the switch to Euros the way Saddam did then governments world wide would no longer be forced to have dollar reserves to buy their oil. A rush to dump newly unnecessary dollar reserves on the market would result in a catastrophic crash of the dollar's value. I'll leave the likelihood of that happening for you two to debate.
I posted earlier. I'm going to post again. I posted at 1, nested deeply... but this is something that burns inside me. I wish I had filed a complaint against the department when I was an undergraduate, I will someday, but it will be too late then. I don't even know how to do so.
In some places, the police can do whatever they please. You have no rights if the right people want to take them away from you. Police need to be watched for misconduct. There are good officers out there, who make our world safer.
That said, I can't think of one incident involving the police, where I was an undergrad, that went the way it should have.
So, my criminal activities. I drank underage. That was really about it though. I was an A student, president of Lutheran Student Movement, and logged hundreds of hours of community service in my free time.
So, how about my dealings with the police (I'm going to leave out a lot, this gets long):
1: A guy picks a fight with me outside the student union at the behest of a young lady who dislikes me. Police come. They try to trick me into admitting to a crime I didn't commit. They load me into a car to be "escorted" back. I say something a little rude (but justified) about the situation. The officer in the car proceeds to arrest me. He takes my wallet, says the picture does not look like me. I spend the night in jail as John Doe, and the police inside are warned that I am dangerous. When I asked the school lawyer for free representation (the school gives free legal services to students), she said she couldn't represent me because she was related to a party involved in my incident. The university did not seek to provide me with other representation. In the aftermath, everything was dropped because there was no evidence against me. This didn't end my adventures with the local police though.
2: Police come onto my property to break up a party. The party is hidden from the street, obscured by 2 large buildings surrounding my yard. I am told that I am tresspassing (people are entering the yard from my house, through the only door that leads into the yard, the neighbors had no yards). We called the only good cop I knew and had the police called away.
3: The only good cop I knew gets fired.
4: A kid gets severely beaten at a local party. I take him back to my place and call 911. I get patched through to the police, who refuse to come out and take care of the situation. This kid had all of his teeth broken, had a broken nose, and was bleeding pretty steadily. I feared for his life. It gets worse, while I'm on the phone with the police, I lose him! The police refuse to come out and look for him. After many phone calls, I find out that the kid had been brought to the hospital by some friends who saw him wandering the street.
4: I get a death threat. An officer comes out, listens to it, tells me its a prank. I said I thought not, and asked to have my phone calls traced for a few days. The officer refuses. I stay in a friends house for a few days.
5: Not long later, a friend of mine back home died of cancer. The girl I was dating at the time loaned me her car (she went to a different school). The day she came back to pick it up, her brakes lines went at about 70 miles an hour, hurtling her car out of control. She survived through some clever driving. The mechanic who looked at the vehicle (damaged, but in one piece), said that it had obviously been sabotaged. We didn't even bother to call the police on this one.
6: The snowboard team had a party. We purchased a permit. The police showed up about 30 mins before the permit expired. One of them asked me to help him steal satellite service, but I refused. The minute the permit expired the police came in and shut us down, and fined us around $2000.
So, where am I now? I'm a graduate student at a respected university. I like my life. I haven't had any legal problems. I loved the professors at the school where I was an undergrad, but this stuff was unacceptable.
I'll pose a quick question. Does anybody know how to fix this? Does anybody know any way that I can possibly seek to fix this terrible situation? How do you file a complaint against a police department?
He's an idiot?
You've got to be kidding me. You are calling the Supreme Court a bunch of activist judges! At least they weren't rewriting Florida election law after the election.
The first decision nullified a Florida supreme court decision to change the way votes were counted by a 9-0 vote! 9-0! Just try to tell me that they are all Bush supporters.
There was also a 7-2 vote that declared the selective recounts unconstitutional.
The 5-4 decision only ruled that the recount business has to end because there wasn't enough time to count the votes before the electors were chosen.
Americans: the enemy of the free world.
cos I know otherwise - I have good friends who are Americans.I'm certainly aware of the distinction and while your current govt is particularly at odds with the rest of us, this isn't exactly new. Many argue that the US hegemony started with the Bretton Woods agreement after the Second World War. We in the UK have only just finished paying back your bonds that paid for that.
And as you lot are so fond of telling the rest of us: you're a democracy so it is your government and your responsibility...
Your govt is also very fond of demonising other countries and their inhabitants (the USSR, Iraq, Iran, North Korea) and even by religion (Islam), so surely you're big enough to take similar blunt criticism.
Anyway your suggested alternative just isn't snappy enough! But it is time for something better, but in the meantime:
--
USA: home of the world's largest terrorist training camp.
You must be daft, or your country is practicing revisionist history.
.
My family, the Snowballs, is here because my Great Great Gandfater when he was 12 was caught hunting on a neighboring nobles land, they gave then 2 options, hang the boy, or the whole family leaves England.
12 members in all made the trip, all the Snowballs from that reigon, many were none too happy, and a few returned, but better than see a 12 yyear old boy hanged
That was 1874
4 days later, and some moderator is still improperly moderating posts in this discussion, rather than things that are on the front page. Great job!
That reminds me - I haven't metamoderated for a while...