Tainted Money?

What if we started tracing how money moves around in our economy, in an open and transparent way?

Hypothetically, Practically (see below(!)), I can start voluntarily taint money that goes through me. Publicize how much money I got from who, and to who do I give it. An extreme way of “voting” with every economic transaction I make. What if organizations started to do this in a standardized way?

Could this make some money worth more than other money?

Could this make our economy more “compassionate”, as Daniel Goleman would put it?

Technically, we can very easily start doing some things in this direction. Open a free account, and start logging our transactions over the net.

Decide that the money I got from here, is going in this direction – and see how it goes (or get stuck) from there on…

A proper meta-data would allow us to ask some interesting questions.

Was a shady business involved in the sources I got this money from?

How is my donation being used?

Did the government just “taint” 1 trillion USD last month??

“I only accept money from vegetarians…”

Stuff like that

Sounds easy to implement, and could be tons of fun, don’t you think?

Disclaimer:

<Transaction>

<id>1</id>

<source>http://www.semantinet.com</source>

<target>http://www.eburcat.com</target>

<amount>12</amount>

<date>March 31st, 2009</date>

<unit>USD</unit>

<comment>Salary</comment>

</transaction>

<transaction>

<id>2</id>

<source>http://www.eburcat.com</source>

<target>http://www.istockphoto.com</target>

<amount>1</amount>

<date>April 16th, 2009</date>

<unit>USD</unit>

<comment>That photo you see up there </comment>

</transaction>

Update: a more appropriate representations…

<Transaction>

<id>3</id>

<source>http://www.eburcat.com</source>

<target>http://www.gov.il</target>

<amount>1</amount>

<date>March 31st, 2009</date>

<unit>USD</unit>

<comment>Income tax…</comment>

</transaction>

YouTube channels are a wonderful way to keep up-to-date.
The White-House, TED, or some nice music players (i.e. Playing for change) – all use YouTube channels to stream some great content.
Watching this content offline – could be a great use of your time in some situations…
The problem is, that YouTube doesn’t offer an easy way to get this channel on your MP4 player.

Lucky for me – iTunes together with RSSHandler – offer a solution just for that.

Simply copy-paste the channel’s URL:
i.e. http://www.youtube.com/user/whitehouse
Into the RSSHandler: http://www.rsshandler.com/converter

And put the resulting url:

http://www.rsshandler.com/flvrss.rss?feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Frss%2Fuser%2Fwhitehouse%2Fvideos.rss&format=18

Into iTunes as a new PodCast.
Start downloading the different videos of the channel (iTunes handle this for you).
And sync your iPhone with these videos (again, iTunes did a wonderful job).

Voila.

Obama video addresses are now offline-copied to my train rides…

Fun

RentPA - The fastest way to rent in Tel-Aviv

I’m quite sure it’s possible to find my next place for rent with an investment of about 6 hours, and a month’s worth of rent. The plan is this:

• 40 minutes interview over Skype with MyRentPA ™.
• Scan through videos of appropriate appartments – ~5mins x 8 videos.
• A deeper look into the top 3 appartments: 10 mins x 2.
• ~3 meetings x 1.5 hours.

The only problem is that MyRentPA doesn’t really exist. Yet. I wish they opened a branch in Tel-Aviv already.

Do you think it’s possible for a Real Estate agent to video tape his candidate appartments, make a bit of a story out of each one, have a short interview with the owners, some easy editing, and put it all on a plain and effective website?

I think it could save everybody’s time, both the owners and the people who rent the place… It sure doesn’t sound like a big effort… Maybe it could be a nice income for a starting comedian…

I bet that if the system is tuned up properly, it’s possible to make a month’s worth of rent out of each video… Am I missing something .

Thanks, Tal, for the inspiration…