Welp, thanks to domestic and geopolitics, stations in California are posting diesel prices of $9.99 which is the highest number possible without massive upgrades to pump and display systems. I'm old enough to remember when gas topped $1.00 circa 1980. Pumps back then had physical digits in mechanical displays, and many stations modded the internal gearing and added a painted or stickered on 1. next to the mechanical digits, and many stayed that way for years and years.

My first adult job was at one of the last LA area stations that hadn't converted the service bays to a mini mart with 1 cashier and digital remote pumps. I thought I was applying for a mechanic job but that old fart just used me as a pump jockey till a Pep boys hired me.

We'd run payment to the central cash box and run change back out, and process MasterCharge and Bank Americard payments using an old school chunk-chunk quadruplicate form imprinter. After each sale, we'd reset the pump with a special square key and the numbers would noisily reset to zero.

I remember one day, the gas price had fluctuated up like 4c since the week before. This old fart, plausibly a WWI vet, took his anger at this with me, an 18yo with zero control over the fact; shouting, WE SHOULD HAVE JUST TOLD THOSE IRANIANS HOW MUCH WE'D PAY THEM FOR THE GODDAMN OIL!!! The he tried to screech off like a power flex in his 20yo 8MPG lead sled that was obviously misfiring on at least 2 of its 8 cylinders.

Funny afterward, I was working at a tire store 2 years later when the old fart station owner came in to buy 2 tires for a customer's car. He spotted me across the shop and started yelling out, DON'T HIRE THAT GUY, HE'LL QUIT ON YOU!! HE'LL QUIT! HE'LL QUIT ON YOU!! As he kept on, I realized he wasn't joking, he was still seriously bitter over me quitting after ignoring several inquiries about promotion to mechanic work. The other pump jockey I had worked with was 30 years my senior, content to coast in a near minimum wage nowhere job.

@SeasonedRP

The exchange rate is a fundamental indicator of conditions in a country; it's the opposite of cherry picking.

A rats nest of presumptions underlying this statement. That currencies aren't manipulated by the bankster and Globalist class, and that the present Western economic system's present valuation of the Rial's exchange worth isn't affected by the same Globalist class imposing decades of sanctions and trade restrictions, including outright theft of trillions in Iran's wealth.

BRICS and the SCO are poised to take most of the world's countries and currencies off the board away from where the Western elite dominated monetary system has long played them..

Would be nice if all this would end soon.

Literally all the wars of my Adult life going back to the 80s, I've been told by partisan gob slobberers that "This is going to be quick! President is just gonna go in there, and kick some ASS! Country is gonna be a cake walk. We're gonna be in and out of there!!! America has been in Iran's business and borders, since 1953 when my Dad was just a little kid.