From Money God to the Unmonastery

With the pope claiming people should stop worshipping the money god there's all the more reason for Moneyless.org to thrive. Unfortunately the pope also urges the unemployed to "fight for work" (sic!). I personally think there's just not enough work for people to start fight about (as we can see from the situation in Japan). In my opinion, if there's a fight it should be about achieving prosperity for all in other ways, such as through basic income. And it doesn't look like there's much time to waste.

Joris Luyendijk, a Dutch anthropologist, has been in The City of London for over two years. He's kept a blog about what bankers think. And it's not pretty. Joris has not become more hopeful about the future of banking, and let's be honest, we can strive for a moneyless future but if we'd get there tomorrow there would be havoc and many people dead in a short time span. The same pessimist thoughts can be had about politics and other businesses but unfortunately, banks have shown to collapse and in the meanwhile the resilience has not so much increased.

Bitcoin could be an alternative, and there are some pretty cool things out there, but as is it's not going to safe the world. Give it another year or 4 and it might help society a lot when banks will be collapsing again. But it would still remain far from an egalitarian system. Which takes me to the unmonastery planned in Matera, where I'm likely to have a talk or do a workshop about moneyless, unmonetizing and the links with Bitcoin.

Free wiki software

Hardly anyone who surfs the internet has not seen Wikipedia. Still many people are unaware of the etymology of the name. The term wiki was actually coined by Ward Cunningham in 1995 when he wanted to create a website for common programming patterns. He chose the word "wiki" which means fast in Hawaiian, a dying language. Ward's wiki was a big success and is still used today. Six years later Jimmy Wales started Wikipedia, which was actually a side project of Nupedia, which was supposed to be a serious encyclopedia written by professors and PhDs.

Pregnant and no money

Pregnant and no money. What now? My wife and me were sitting at the midwife for our first appointment. We were talking about finances and we were asked how we thought to raise the money, without money. We were slightly confused by this question. And possibly naively we posed ourselves the question: "Money? Do we really need it for a baby?"

Free Stuff

Free Stuff

What are the ways that rich people give away free stuff? Every year trillions of dollars - you read that right - are redistributed as the rich of the world throw away, sell for cheap, donate or invest.

Free weed: drugs ain't funny

It might sound funny, but there are ways to get free weed if you don't have money. The first thing to add of course it that drugs are bad. You should not use drugs, even if they are free. But if you are going to smoke weed anyway you might as well do so without losing money. Here are some tips.