little big cookie shake @ 11:06 pm

I've been spending a lot of my attention on alternative currencies lately, driven by an interest in the Portland Timebank community and partners. I've been in some discussions lately about different directions the timebank might develop in, and some of these conversations have succeeded in challenging enough of my assumptions about economies that I've concluded I have no idea how it works right now.¹

I've been holding off asking this question, because it feels like a sort of novice "rtfm n00b" question, but I haven't read the manual yet and at this point it's worth writing down just to get out of my head. And after talking it over with stereotype441 at dinner the other night, I think I can articulate it well enough to do so.

A time bank is a type of "mutual credit" currency. If I'm selling you a bike tune-up service, when I tune up your bike a credit is debited from your account and added to my account. All the accounts in the system sum to zero, and nobody has to worry about who is issuing the currency and if they're issuing too much of it or what have you. (Or so the story goes.)

A natural consequence of this is that there will always be accounts with a negative balance. That's fine, a negative balance in this system is expressed as a "commitment" to provide that value in the future. But if I keep using the rules I understand from participating in the $USD economy, things don't make much sense.

The rules I have, in my old "money is an asset I have" mindset, go something like this:

• As a consumer (buyer), I want to acquire as many goods and services as I can with the resources that are available to me. I will probably never reach a state where my appetite for all goods and services is sated. I will stop only when I run out money.
• As a producer (seller), I want to do as much business as possible. Maybe because I love what I do, probably because it's profitable and I want to increase the size of my pile of money, but as long as a customer's money is good so that doing business doesn't incur a loss for me, I'll do business with them.

But when I run with those rules in an economy where the buyer doesn't stop when he hits $0, I get a situation where the buyer never stops buying and the seller never stops selling. Any exchange-for-currency is available at any time, which leads me to wonder why anyone's bothering to do any accounting at all.

So, clearly, I've talked myself into a ridiculous state here. What are the components I've left out that make this accounting structure useful?

Like I said, I expect the answer is RTFM. My reading list currently contains No More Throw-Away People (Cahn), Economics in One Lesson (Hazlitt), The Creature from Jekyll Island (Griffin), The End of Money and the Future of Civilization (Greco), and Making Money (Pratchett).² Suggestions for additions or prioritization are quite welcome.

Footnotes:

1. Having no idea about it works is not a bad result of those conversations. Which is to say, it is a much better state than having an equivalent amount of knowledge but being under the impression that I do know how it works.
2. Okay, the Pratchett book is just for fun, but the fantastically titled The Creature from Jekyll Island is entirely serious.

ginger cheesecake @ 01:11 am

A really geeky thing I am writing down for reference:

Oh, and on the subject of geeky things in Ubuntu Jaunty: I clicked on the display properties applet in my panel, it said something about not working with my driver but it would launch the vendor's (NVidia's) tool instead, and there, under GPU 0/DFP-1, there is a selector for "GPU Scaling Method," that makes it so fullscreen apps written for the 4:3 aspect ratio don't get stretched out on my 16:10 monitor. Neat! I've been looking for a toggle for that for a while now.

carrot soup @ 07:34 pm

I've just read the first chapter of Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming our Schools. It's written by the Change Leadership Group at Harvard.

One of the things that stood out for me in this chapter is where they're making the case for not "reform" in education but "reinvention."

America's system of public education, especially at the secondary level, was deliberately designed as a sorting machine. The industrial economy of the twentieth century needed only a very small number of college-educated citizens. It wasn't until the 1950s that half our students received a high school diploma. [...] Throughout the twentieth century, students who dropped out of high school were able to seek and hold good, stable jobs that paid a middle-class wage.

[...] In fact, we have never educated all, or even most, students to the standard of "college-ready." It is not as if educators were doing this in earlier decades and then forgot how. The system has not "failed." It was designed perfectly to produce the results it needed, and attained.

There's some historical context that I didn't have. Pretty much the only history I've looked at in my recent advocacy for public education is that around the time of my own experience in the '90s, which we talk about primarily as "school funding in Oregon has been cut every year since then." But I haven't really had a conversation with anybody about the design of the current system, or the expectations that were in place at the time.

So the author's contention is that the currently prevailing attitude is something along the lines of: we take the current system, add some accountability measures in the form of reading and math tests or what have you, make the numbers go up, and then the young people of our nation will once again have the skills necessary to thrive in today's global economy. But they say that this is not a winning strategy, that schools are by and large operating in an obsolete system. They make an analogy with the typewriter. Reform a typewriter, and you get the electric typewriter. They're calling for not a reformed typewriter, but the personal computer.

I'm not quite sure how long I'll stick with this book, as its intended audience is quite clearly those who are currently in a position of leadership with the staff of a school or school district, but it also seems like good reading for the "what I want to be when I grow up" category. On that note, the author biographies say that one of the authors lives in Portland. One who isn't a superintendent or director or fellow at Harvard. That sounds like someone I want to talk to about what I want to be when I grow up. I'll try to contact her through the CLG, but because Portland is small, I ask: Can you introduce me to Harriette Thurber Rasmussen?

grilled cheese and tomato soup @ 12:48 am

Uh, which of you, or which three of you, were just looking for the web service that does this?

I have _____
category [ Skill or service / Item / Space or resource ]
asking ______
(you can set an asking price or a preferred barter item)
[ ] This is only available to my trusted neighbors

Examples:

• Skills and services, like: Salsa dancing lessons, carpentry, accounting
• Spaces and resources, like: board room, backyard patio, lawn garden
• Items, like: books, tools, paint, seeds

That's the inventory sharing interface at Bright Neighbor.

toast and more toast @ 03:41 pm

Okay, I must be getting old, because I need to ask you to explain an online communication thing to me: What is the deal with the Facebook wall? Why do people try to start conversations there instead of sending me a message? Wall posts are not threaded and the audience doesn't seem to match and I don't get it.

I guess I sort of understand the wall as a space for "happy birthday" and "hey come to the show tonight", as there are some messages that you actually want to make in a public forum, but ... okay I'm just going to stop talking now and let you tell me how this works.

Almond butter and berry jelly @ 01:59 pm

Here's one thing I don't really get about keeping dogs as housepets: They don't read, write, knit, talk on the phone, or play World of Warcraft. What does a dog in a single-dog household do all day? A cat goes where it pleases, but here in the city a dog can't really go out on its own.

She was pretty upset at first when everyone she knew left her here, but she calmed down after a little while. Now she just seems more bored than anything else. She lies here, with the occasional heavy sigh, looking at the door, sometimes drifting off to daydream. Then a car door slams or the mailman comes and she wakes up and whines a little more...

The only thing she seems really happy about is the prospect of going out, but we're not going to be able to go on walks all day.

chutny, chana dal, and sherry lassi roobios chai @ 11:59 pm

Oh Portland, you are small and strange. Also, bicycles are friendly.

I was at a party where I knew no-one but the one person who invited me. But we were in inner southeast and there was a fair size crowd there, so I kept expecting someone else I'd met to turn up. Didn't happen though.

Then I got on my bike and started the five mile ride home. At about the first mile, someone I know pulled up in a car beside me, and rolled down their window to say hi. About a mile after that, a fellow bicyclist in a yellow jacket hailed me from the other side of an intersection, and we pulled over to chat for a bit. (I didn't recognize him with the mustache, but I knew him too.)

Running in to folks in waterfront park (which also happened twice in the last week) is one thing. Meeting people in traffic at eleven o'clock at night is weirder.

zucchini stir-fry @ 10:55 pm

Today I

• Pulled weeds with AJ and Kenny at Meek ProTech
• Met Principal Speed at Woodlawn
• Ate salad and played frisbee with our new neighbors (who, it turns out, are old neighbors of Salut)
• Made dinner with empty_fork in akatchoom's kitchen.

summer salad @ 02:37 pm

Tonight is National Night Out, which means it's likely your neighbors are throwing a party. Fellow Portlanders may check the list at the Office of Neighborhood Involvement, or come join us in Woodlawn Park. Here's the blurb from Go Woodlawn:

We hope you’ll join us for this awesome night out in Woodlawn! Parks and Recreation is bringing the Spiderwick Chronicles to Woodlawn Park for a night of free movie watching, popcorn, a climbing wall, a raffle, crafting for kids and much more. We’re providing food vendors, exhibitors, safety information and more. Portland’s Woodlawn Neighborhood, a book on Woodlawn history by neighbor Anjala Ehelebe, will be available for sale on site.

The event starts at 6pm and the movie begins at 9pm. So gather your friends and family, pack a lawn chair or blanket and come enjoy a lovely summer night out in Woodlawn!

I'll be there staffing a table for Stand for Children. Come say hi!

little bear's vegetable omelette @ 07:28 pm

It's that time of year again. Does anyone want to join me for da Vinci Days in Corvallis this year? My current plans are to be there on Saturday the 19th. (I have a thing in Keizer to be at on Sunday afternoon.) Kinetic sculptures, human kaleidoscope, fun stuff.

Let me know if you're interested in going.