Like Money

Some time ago I picked up and read the Lapham's Quarterly about money. It is a collection of writings about money from different places and times and sources. Everything from scholarly articles to excerpts from plays. It caught my attention because money has always been one of those things I just took for granted - not really thought about (just the getting of it).

There were tow articles in the book that stood out in my mind. One extolled the virtues of money as the greatest of all things. Money, it said, was pure good because it represented work done and condensed. Portable work that could be exchanged for anything and therefore it was anything, endless possibility. Money was more efficient than barter and it was more efficient because it enabled the worker to focus on what they were good at and enjoyed and this too would be more efficient.

The second article expressed the view that money was a bad thing. Money is useless until you convert it into something useful and you could only do that if you could find someone willing to trade something useful for something useless. This leads to imbalances and waste. I think this one might have been written by a communist and it wasn't very convincing.

Anyway I've just started reading a new book called The Moneyless Man and in this book the author is going to recount his year of living with out money - the freeconomy he calls it. In the beginning he postulates on the imaginary money being spent in the world today and concludes for two new reasons why money is evil.

First he says money has separated the consumer from the resources being consumed. The idea is that if you made your own clothes you'd be a lot less quick to throw it out for a minor stain or rip or change of fashion. This would apply to everything - americans wouldn't throw out 40% of their food like they do today if each person produced their own food because you'd appreciate the work that went into it. In a way this possibly refers to the imbalances the communists were talking about.

The second evil of money is that it can be stored so easily. This too, he says, leads to over consumption. His line of reasoning seems to be that cutting down and selling off the whole forest converts it into the security of a full bank account. Without money the security would be in having a forest and using parts of it as it becomes needed. This is where the imaginary money becomes such a problem - because on a global scale how much longer is it before there is more money (spent credit) than resources to buy with it? If a loaf of bread costs $10 and you show up to the store with your $20 bill but the store doesn't have even one loaf to sell you...

So I'll let you know how it turns out.

Control Freaks

Everyone knows that the car you drive is considered to be a personal statement. That’s why there are like 600 different models of cars on the road available in a rainbow of colours. And then there is the constellation of overpriced aftermarket parts with which to rice up your ride.

I’ve being doing a lot of sitting in my car in traffic lately and it has come to my attention that how you drive your car is also a bold statement of who you are - perhaps more telling than how you actually behave in actual interpersonal interactions.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of public transit has always been to convince people to leave their cars at home and they admit that it’s not easy. People love their expensive planet killing cars in large part because it’s the one place where they can feel that they are in control - of the music, the temperature, the speed and ultimately, where they are going. You don’t get this in a shared home, in the office, at the mall, outdoors and for the most part in life. This is probably also why savings aside the HOV lanes are pretty empty – the daily commute is the one place you don’t have to make compromises.

To come back on topic in the safe feeling and empowering environment of their automobile people should be expected to act more like how they really feel rather than how they think they are supposed to behave. In most places you might expect this to mean a lot of aggressive drivers and as a former bicycle courier I can tell you that you do get a lot of them and they tend to drive the same types of cars and minivans - lots of psychopaths out there in minivans.

In the GTA this has helped me to feel some sympathy for my fellow residents. Probably 80% of the drivers in the GTA drive like madmen and madwomen when they are on the highway but then when they get off the highway on the streets they drive like the absolute last thing in the world they would ever want to do is get where they are going and out of the car back into a world totally out of their control.

Winter's coming

Once upon a time I thought my shed was a rough looking piece of work but now I have my winter shelter built and the shed is looking pretty good. In our defense the winter shelter is made of scrap and intended to be a temporary shelter.

It’s pretty chilly out now so I’m getting to that point of the year when I’m looking forward to the snow and the snowshoeing. And this year I’ll have a place to go snowshoeing and boiling up without the need for elaborate planning to evade the authorities.

We hung around in Trenton visiting friends on Halloween. It’s the first time since moving to TV land that I’ve actually witnessed a TVesque Halloween. There were hundreds of kids swarming the neighbourhood in all manner of costumes. Even a house down the street providing scary noises (quite a creepy soundtrack of screams actually). In the previous decade, everywhere I’ve lived I’ve seen between ten and zero trick or treaters.