Local Currencies

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I've got two issues with this concept.

The first one is, "What's local?"

I'm an Earthling.  As I understand it, my cash won't be leaving Earth.

The second is that I've got training that (on a good day) returns well over an 'hour' of most untrained labor's value.

In short, if I take ten dollars (the current DNow! story's exchange rate) as equivalent to an 'hour' of work, I'll be short by an order of magnitude.

I'm a little curious about how the 'hours' folks work with the disparity between skilled and unskilled labor.

For instance, if I'm paying someone to do my yard work, I can pretty much pick from interchangeable parts.

If I'm looking for a doctor, or a lawyer, on the other hand, I have to pick from a much smaller pool.

I'm betting that there are few of those professions who accept the 'hours' concept as a medium of 'exchange' (and that would be because it's not an 'exchange' but either a gift, or a manner of theft, depending on whether it was voluntary or not).

I was considering taking part in the local version, as I had some work I could do for a lawyer, and he could do some work for me.

But really, it's not a good deal for me to take anything but cash for the rest of the work.

I suppose it's irrelevant, as I'm far more inclined to purchase from the internet rather than look locally, for the most part, as that's my 'community' and the locals here have the most peculiar and useless tastes (as I understand 'taste').  For example, I can purchase any kind of dental floss I would like here, as long as it's covered in wax (been through every store in town before I ordered unwaxed from Amazon).  I purchased some books here, but really, I get them faster from Amazon (since the local stores don't stock the books I'd normally purchase).  I even bothered to go down to the local vacuum store when I got here, but I couldn't get them to sell me what I wanted (they had lame crap they needed to offload and were willing to tell me anything to get me to purchase what they had on the shelf rather than order what I wanted for me).

The single most depressing thing about stores here is that I'm supposedly in the midst of this great agricultural area, and the folks here are supposedly the vanguard of the organic movement, and there's NO decent stores here that provide any proof of this.

Yes, it's pitiable, but not just do Whole Foods, Wild Oats, and even HEB do a better job of provision of product, even the cheesy co-op in Albuquerque is head-and-shoulders above anything here.  I used to pass up the meat at the co-op, planning on going to Wild Oats later, since it was cheaper, and they had a real butcher's counter there.

At least it wasn't bad meat.   And the vegetables looked like they'd been purchased by someone who might have an interest in how they looked.

In other words, 'organic' doesn't need to mean crappy looking, deformed, bug and bird pecked, and full of something that the farmer thought was 'character'.

I think that perhaps the folks here are using the improper terms.

For instance 'organic' means it was grown without unnatural fertilization.

'Natural' is a little more broad, but it's still just describing a process, not the results.

If the 'results' are less professional looking in final appearance than other results, then the word one would use is actually 'amateur'.

In other words, it doesn't matter if the meat has no hormones in it if it's been left out too long and has spoiled.

It doesn't matter if there are no pesticides on the fruit, if it's obviously not the first time it's been eaten.

It doesn't matter if there's no sulphur in the wine, if it's too expensive to afford (yes, less does, in fact, cost more).

And if it's got a pathogen on it, it's irrelevant whether that pathogen has been raised 'naturally'.

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This page contains a single entry by writch published on April 9, 2009 9:48 AM.

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