Well, I take it back abou... (27 Apr 2002)
Well, I take it back about Kompessor after Zooko pointed me to some of her better works (namely Attack and Release and Never Talk to Strangers).
I read this in the latest issue of New Scientist:
The depression had hit, and the town had thousands out of work and little money in the municipal coffers. So the mayor printed his own. The value of the Worgl "stamp scrip" was set to automatically depreciate: this is, it earned negative interest.Once a month, its holders had to pay a "stamp" fee of 1 per cent of the value of the note. The result was that everyone spend the new money in the town as fast as possible. The streets were re-paved, the water system rebuilt, new houses appeared, then a ski jump, a new bridge. Some 200 other Austrian towns came up with plans to copy it, the central bank panicked, and it became a criminal offence to issue currency.
That's pretty stunning. I always wondered what the basis of the fiscal system was - thinking it must be pretty stunningly complex and well thought out. I'm pretty much of the opinion that it's not thought out at all and just works because of luck and is designed by powerful conservative, neophobic organisations.
Some other links which mention this story:
- http://www.transaction.net/money/cc/cc04.html
- http://www.valleydollars.org/history.htm
- http://ccdev.lets.net/materials/briefhist.html
- http://www.globalideasbank.org/BOV/BV-101.HTML
I'm sure you can all Google for other links as well as the next person
My book of the moment is Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation (1558603204) (Table of Contents). It's a real blood stopper when you open it on your lap, but it's a really good book (from what little I've read) as this stuff is pretty difficult to digup off the net. More when I've finished it.
Looking to build some kiosk boxes (Internet access only) at school so I set a P75 (16MB of memory) building Gentoo. 20 hours later is had only got to building gcc (the first time) so I scrapped that idea and installed Gentoo chrooted on metis (Gentoo is cool in that you can do that sort of thing) and copied it over.
Ouch is it slow loading galeon! I'm talking 5-10 minutes to load and display a web page. And that's after having to run X on the frame buffer because it can't seem to drive the Mach64 card. I'm going to have to look at a lighter weight solution. (maybe netscape is smaller - I'm sure the memory is the major problem).
This is today's really random link. Quite a few broken links on the page - but still lots of (maybe) interesting stuff.