"I love that you've brought this to attention. An extensive database of uncommon but resistant and hardy plants/foods could be developed and organized by climate. Ease of growth and processing should also be taken in to account. I will try to…"
A crash course in changing the world.
Escaping the trap of credit cards
I read a bunch of personal finance bloggers - I have ever since the pre-recession media frenzy because I felt it was a more positive step than absorbing the body blows of constant media despair. The frugality folks may be a little anal about washing Baggies for reuse, more exacting than a lot of us, but they usually give off the energy of "can do" around the nation's fiscal issues.
So I'm no stranger to sites like freecycle.org - which I've used to give away things - and as a Xbox gamer/Zune owner, no stranger to alternate currencies ala Microsoft points . I'm used to the idea of trading a morning of baking for a few hours gardening (though I have not managed to do that kind of trade yet)
But I was excited to ponder the notion of bypassing credit cards entirely as this UK article suggested people were doing: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/2259308/Freecycle-helps-mill... and also the startups/companies like PayPal that create money exchanges that again, get cheaper for the consumer and bypass those fees to folks selling as well as buying.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/02/ff_futureofmoney/all/1 .
When we get down to it, money is an abstraction, and so is trust, and the keys that unlock the doors to a more efficient system seem to be more present - in social networks, in these new mediums of exchange and loans (think Lending Club, where you can lend to your neighbors or kiva.org).
I've read Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and while I love what Tara Hunt uses it for in explaining social media, I would hate social capital to truly become the commodity because of so many folks like myself who were not the most popular kid in school, do not look like celebrities, etc. People's perception of others could be founded on prejudice or bias - so I'm still holding fast to the idea of currency as a measure of work done. But I can see where new systems of exchange and verifying trust can lead us to new forms of "money" - which when it comes down to it means more ways for folks to be enriched.
This is a great evoke week, I'm going to be pondering a lot more. This blog post is just a beginning of the thinking I'll have to do. :)
Next day note: Just wanted to add a link to this article about how credit cards are the safest right now vs. fraud. That's a real concern as we head into the future:
http://www.fivecentnickel.com/2010/03/29/credit-cards-are-safest-on...
and the new systems of currency will have to match this, or lose out to peopole who don't want to be vulnerable.
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