Primate Brow Flash

I set off to participate in the Hiawatha Cyclery Saturday ride early this morning. The roads were packed snow interlaced with ridges left behind by plows. Plenty of icy ruts made for near perfect terrain for the Nokians that I so richly deserve. Blue crystals had been spilled everywhere but it wasn’t warm enough for them to work. Before I got there I realized that I wasn’t dressed warmly enough and that if I went ahead with this madness, I would be coming home with some of my parts in a doggie bag.

Just when I couldn’t feel my toes, I took refuge in a coffee shop along the way and found, among the books they share, The Parsifal Mosaic by Robert Ludlum.

One thing I learned from the book is that if you make someone pass out with a choke hold, you can extend the time they’ll be unconscious by whacking them in the temple with the butt of an automatic pistol. Its like, additive. I didn’t know it worked that way.

Discussing alternative currencies to bypass taxes and fearful banks.

In his book The Future of Money, Lietaer points out - as the government did yesterday - that in situations like ours everything grinds to a halt for want of money. But he also explains that there is no reason why this money should take the form of sterling or be issued by the banks. Money consists only of “an agreement within a community to use something as a medium of exchange”. The medium of exchange could be anything, as long as everyone who uses it trusts that everyone else will recognise its value. During the Great Depression, businesses in the United States issued rabbit tails, seashells and wooden discs as currency, as well as all manner of papers and metal tokens. In 1971, Jaime Lerner, the mayor of Curitiba in Brazil, kick-started the economy of the city and solved two major social problems by issuing currency in the form of bus tokens. People earned them by picking and sorting litter: thus cleaning the streets and acquiring the means to commute to work. Schemes like this helped Curitiba become one of the most prosperous cities in Brazil.

The examples cited are all constructive. But, if it were adopted on a large scale, this is a disruptive and tantalizing idea. It would really make this country hard to govern. What if we, the people, disgruntled by taxes and under-served by banks, began issuing untaxable, untracable currency to pay for goods and services.
“U.S. law prevents states from issuing their own currency but allows private groups to print paper scrip, though not coins”, said Lewis Solomon, a professor of law at George Washington University, who studies local currencies.

A long history

in 1932. Like most communities in Europe at the time, Wörgl, Austria suffered from mass unemployment and a shortage of money for public works. Instead of spending the town’s meagre funds on new works, the mayor put them on deposit as a guarantee for the stamp scrip he issued. By paying workers in the new currency, he paved the streets, restored the water system and built a bridge, new houses and a ski jump. Because they would soon lose their value, Wörgl’s own schillings circulated much faster than the official money, with the result that each unit of currency generated 12 to 14 times more employment. Scores of other towns sought to copy the scheme, at which point - in 1933 - the central bank stamped it out. Wörgl’s workers were thrown out of work again.

Similar projects took off at the same time in dozens of countries. Almost all of them were closed down (just one, Switzerland’s WIR system, still exists) as the central banks panicked about losing their monopoly over the control of money. Roosevelt prohibited complementary currencies by executive decree, though they might have offered a faster, cheaper and more effective means of pulling the US out of the Depression than his New Deal.

Here is a more detailed history of Wörgl

Recent efforts, large and small:

The comments to the original article document many, many examples of alternative currencies, many created to keep wealth within a certain community.

The underlying point is that the government and the financial world is busy promising our future earnings away and as municipal services decline and taxes creep up, people are going to be looking for a way to renege on the promises made in our name.

as a side note, what a fascinating thing to collect! Some of them are very beautiful. There are people that collect odd currencies and counterfeit notes, but not a whole lot about collecting alternative currencies.

Here are some links about alternative currencies:
As Collectibles
Metafilter discussion
Wikipedia
Big gallery of alternative currencies
neat site about Madison Hours

There is a magic cube at my new job. Perhaps it should be labeled “the cube of requirement”.
There are sumptuous snacks there every day. Sometimes it is Sunday brunch leftovers. Sometimes it is
a cake celebrating somebody’s anniversary of quitting smoking. Other times cakes just appear with no explanation. Yesterday there was nothing there all day and just when I was frantic for some food at 2:30 in the afternoon, a single lemon bar appeared there on a plate. Just for me.

It is labeled ‘work area’, but the only work that goes on in there is slicing bundt cake.

I overheard someone comment Tuesday that it hasn’t been the horn of plenty that it once was, that the cube seems rather depleted, like it is under strain. That worries me. Have I missed the golden age of the magic cube?

I also noticed that girl scout cookie deliveries are done by hand truck.

something strange is happening in this town. Like the fabric of reality is melting away. Move one square up the street and it gets even worse!

You can see that Google street view uses the ground behind the van from the previous image to paste over the spot where the van should be in each picture.

studies show that access to home energy information results in savings between 5-15% on monthly electricity bills. It may not sound like much, but if half of America’s households cut their energy demand by 10 percent, it would be the equivalent of taking eight million cars off the road.

Google has rolled out a web service that lets you track home energy use. It isn’t available to the public yet, but it looks like what I’ve always wanted… a way to track and display home energy use, so I can think about it more clearly and so I can show it to the kids so they can think about it more clearly and remember to turn their F$ocking lights off.

It looks cool as hell.

I rented a mountain bike at the Northeast Cyclery of Albuquerque. I recommend them as a bike shop. Very reasonably priced and helpful. I biked from there to the Sandia Foothills. Partly because Albuquerque is more than a mile up in elevation, and partly because it was uphill the whole way, I was huffing and puffing to even get to the trailhead. Once there, I took a long rest and then started up trail 365 that runs north and south along the eastern edge of town. It is a roller coaster ride of a trail, with banked turns, sharp downhills, and plenty of rocks. Good for any level of skill.

When I was done, I plummeted down the bear canyon arroyo. Albuquerque is lousy with these arroyos. Sometimes they are paved with steep cement walls and take you through deep sand, puddles, shopping carts, and giant weeds. Other times, they are made into recreation areas with trails. When they work they are great for biking, as they take you under streets and through the backs of neighborhoods. As they get closer to the Rio Grande, they get more and more industrial and scary and prohibited. I made about 4 pedal strokes the entire way back to the hotel.

Albuquerque is situated in a giant gravel pit. There is no topsoil except what has been painstakingly imported. Peel up a patch of turf or look under a parking lot and there is gravel. It is the clean fill capitol of the USA.