Eitan Burcat

Posts Tagged ‘Raw idea’

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>

I wonder if http://www.imterriblysorrybut.com can become viral… If you have any suggestion on how to increase the chances of people sharing this – please let me know at the comments.

On any case, the idea for this site crossed my mind a couple of days ago, so I just HAD to try it out…

 

 

A disposable napkin*

I wish napkins had this slogan written on them, with the following text on the other side:

“This napkin was once a tree, growing up in Brazil. Then it got cut down, got mixed with some toxic materials, so that it will look shiny and sell better. Then we printed on it (the text that you are reading in this very moment) – using some more toxic materials. Then it got shipped half way around the world, using some fuel. After you’ll use it, this napkin will get shipped to the nearest dumping location (using some more fuel, and polluting the air a bit more). There – it will deteriorate in the course of the next 5 years, putting all that toxic waste back into the ground. And all of this is done so that for 3 seconds you will look a bit more civilized when you eat your fettucini.”

“Please consider putting this napkin back in the stand, so that the next person sitting here will also get educated”.

Now,

I’m sure that producers of disposable dishes think that these napkins would be a bad business idea. Maybe they are right. But, these napkins can benefit us in a couple of ways:

• They educate about “environmental footprint”.
• Less napkins that the restaurant has to buy and manage.
• Less toxic waste that the restaurant will produce.

I call these “guilt napkins”. Maybe another text can be used to create “educational napkins” or “good karma napkins”. Maybe these napkins shouldn’t get produced at all, and an empty “educational napkins-holder” is enough.

Just a thought.

Please consider sending this blog post to someone that needs it

* In the process of writing this post, no napkins were actually disposed. This photo was downloaded from istockphoto…

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…

Control the access to your own data...

Some incidents that happened lately led us to think quite much about the control of our data:

• In the past couple of months, Facebook had decided to disable the accounts of a couple of friends of ours.
• In 1999, some very important files of mine were hosted on a “Free 50MB storage” service. A year later I found out that my files were taken hostage, and in order to bail them out of that company I had to pay $10.
• Censorship is another concern. I’ve given YouTube and Flickr the liberty to censor my movies and photos. Sometime in the future, they might decide to shutdown their service, clean up their servers, go bankrupt, become a racist totalitarian, or who knows what.
• Some very important accounts of mine are authenticated against my GMail. If someone somehow breaks into it – I can lose control over some Very important accounts of mine.

These are a couple scenarios that happen when we give the control over our own data, to some 3rd parties who might someday betray our trust.

Very annoying.

Very disturbing, when I came to think of it.

Giving the control over my data to some company, suddenly sounds insane. Why should I trust Facebook, Yahoo!, Amazon, Microsoft and Google – with access to my personal data? Why are we forced to trust these companies, when another, very elegant solution is now possible?

Tal Muskal has urged me to think about cloud computing in the past couple of months now. Amazon, Microsoft and Google – all started to offer some cloud storage and computing solutions. These resources are quite cheap, and always available. Together with some open-source development, these solutions can be turned into something very neat.

Imagine that you pay for some storage and CPU time in the cloud. You have full control over the data, and the APIs needed to access this data. All the code is open-source, and the data is encrypted so that you are the only one who controls who gets to see what.

With this scheme, I can control exactly who is permitted to access my pictures. I can allow my Facebook-friends access to my future events, without allowing Facebook-the company access to my list of favorite songs. I can store some audio-clips, and pay $0.17/GB/Month, without the concern that a service will sometime decide to take it down.

This approach is much healthier than the current state we’re in. It removes the need to trust 3^rd parties with some very important data. I believe that the ability to have full control over his own data is something that every heavy Internet user should strive for…