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By scott, August 25, 2010 8:08 am

I was going to be doing all my book reviews on the application that I was planning to build, but that will take sometime to be ready and I would have forgotten what the hell the book was about. So I’ll be posting here in the mean time.

As the book title states it’s about a man who attempts to live without money for twelve months in an effort to show that yes you can and also as an alternative to living in the resource wasteful, greedy, selfish monetary world. Where we are all slaves to debt!. The books starts with the reasons why Mark decides he will live without money and his logic be hide the idea. Also investigations to find out what he needs and how he will do it, but as he has friends in the right places he can get help and advice from them which is very handy. But in general when he takes the plunge he is on his own. The experiment starts somewhere outside of Bristol (England) in November which by all accounts is not the best month to start, but one thing for sure it’s a plunge into the deep end, and from a man whom used to be a former businessman it would be a shock.

The layout is more based on a dairy format as each passing time occurs with updates on issues he encounters & problems on how to over come some of the major huddles that he faces with links to resources that will help a lot. I think that books like this are very important, so we should read them and understand that this is not going back into time, but this is the future as we have to face up to a changing climate, more expensive food, a monetary system that has used all it’s resources and is fighting to stay alive. We have all lost touch with nature & the basic survival skills, we just think about earning money and then buying what we can with out thought to why we need it, the impact on the environment and all the waste that is produced.

He still keeps in touch with the outside world and has a laptop that runs Ubuntu! O the joys of free open source software. Also on that note Mark does highly recommend the use of open source software as part of living without money.

I will not say how he got on or whether he managed to finish the challange but by all accounts he was a happier, more skilled and wiser man than before he started. You can catch up with Mark at his website Freeconomy

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By scott, December 10, 2008 12:57 pm

If you are fed-up with the supermarkets and basically being dictated to on what you buy, then may be buy as a co – operative could be the answer and the way forward in the future. For one you can control were the food comes from, how it was produced and being able to support the local food growers and suppliers. In essence you are taking control of the supply chain.

I think this is a great idea that more of us should be getting into as it has many benefits that are missing today, and would stop us from driving all over the place to get our foods, this would reduce all that import food and long distance which most add lots of extra food miles. It’s all about getting back to being local, buying local and eating seasonal foods.

The guardian has a very good report on this so check it out, “Supermarkets? No, thanks”

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By scott, October 21, 2008 1:03 pm

With the current collapse of the banking system, bail outs by world governments and the world seemly heading into a deep recession the thought occurs to me “What is being done about the climate“.

All the news over the last few months has been about economics and I have not seen the anything about the environment. The worrying thing to me is that with finance’s being tight the governments are going to forget about the environment and just spend money on the economy or should I say paying “Fats Cats” large sums of money.

It has been noted in some areas of the press that we should spend money not on being green or the environment wellbeing but in getting the economy back in shape. This to me this is a very dumb idea, as without a sustainable environment you will have no economy, you need the first “E” before you can have the second “E”. So come on people, come on governments do not be so short sighted and see that the environment must come before anything else, with out it we are dead!!

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By scott, August 1, 2008 1:46 pm

It has been reported in the Guardian that the earth is about to reach the tipping point where global climate change is irreversible. We have about 100 months left which is not that long, so check out onehundredmonths for details on how this was calculated.