Below are the most recent 3 friends' journal entries.

Sunday, July 12th, 2009
puzzlement	9:30p	How to improve public health Discover or suspect that sedentary lifestyles are causing people health problems. Further discover to your shock and horror that people are doing this for such damaging inexplicable reasons as earning a living in an occupation requiring mostly/entirely sedentary desk work. Point out how easy it would be if people would just think a little and spend a bit more of their day exercising. Everyone wants to live longer right? People are so silly. It's not like there's some kind of counter-incentive encouraging them to do the job they're paid for. They just don't know how unhealthy it is to sit around all day! Break the exercise up into bite sized portions so as to point out that it's even easier than people think. It's not an hour a day! It's 30 minutes a day! Plus 30 minutes extra, in small units of time! Profit! There are even advanced forms of this manoeuvre. For example, you could set up some kind of cycle. Because people don't spend much time with their children either! And they don't cook healthy meals from scratch! And employers have noticed that their employees are oddly unwilling to work the long hours this tough economy requires! If we just remind them about all of these things, they'll be able to find an hour a day to exercise, another half hour for changing clothes and showering and such for exercise reasons, an hour a day for cooking, a couple of hours for the kids, an hour for commuting, ten or eleven hours for the office and then there's still the opportunity to remind them that seven and a half hours sleep is really only just acceptable and that we're probably designed for more! Oh, did I say an hour of exercise every day? Oops. That's pretty nice of me. Actually you just need three or four. Caring for yourself: it's all about the 'just'. Originally posted at http://puzzling.org/logs/thoughts/2009/July/12/health-article (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
keturn	11:06p	little big cookie shake 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: 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. Okay, the Pratchett book is just for fun, but the fantastically titled The Creature from Jekyll Island is entirely serious. (39 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009
grimmtooth	11:15a	Reason to worry ( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. ) (2 Comments |Comment on this)