The Web 2.0 dream is to be able to give something away while still making a living on it. That may work for Cory Doctorow, but for most of us, it’s untenable. The only mechanism I’ve seen for paying open source peeps for consumer-grade projects is donations. Paypal and Amazon both provide an ability to donate to a project, as does Pledgie, but I haven’t seen anything that makes donating easy.

Then I found Flattr. It allows donors to give micropayment-style donations to anyone with a web page (and a Flattr account). It makes life easier for donors because they choose how much they will give a month, and that amount is divided amongst their donees.

It isn’t perfect. The Flattr community is pretty sparse, and there’s no way to set a recurring Flattr, but they’re 90% of the way there. It’d be great if Canonical, vim, Parcellite, Google Chrome, kdenlive, and Guake accepted Flattrs.

If you’re looking for an invitation, hit me up with the contact form and I’ll hook you up.

(h/t Raphaël Hertzog)

I don’t have anything against breast implants per se, but I find the entire idea kinda trashy. By “kinda” I mean “excessively.” Boobs are fun to look at and, um, enjoy, but implants are risky. Very, very risky. Which is why I find a website called MyFreeImplants.com¹ a bad idea.

As far as I can tell, the site is basically a bounty system. “Benefactors” (ie, boob oglers) sign up and are provided with a mechanism to communicate with women who want boob jobs. The benefactors request favours (custom videos/photos) of specific women, and, in return, the “gents” can put donate cash for the women to have their breasts augmented.

I’m all for consenting adults exchanging naughty pictures and movies. If they want to involve money in the equation, that’s fine too. But if the end product is a surgical procedure that can lead to nasty complications, I hope that the women are aware of the risks.

1. Please note the use of rel=”nofollow” tag in this post. (back)

Continuing on the economic theme, two stripping-related articles recently caught my attention:

• Strip clubs in the US have started giving change in two dollar bills. The practice is common enough in the Dallas Fort Worth area that a pocket full of two dollar bills is now associated with strip clubs, meaning that punters try to get rid of the twos before leaving the club, resulting in higher tips and more money spent. (from $pread magazine via Utne Reader)
• A study of lap dancers (in strip clubs, not Lapland) shows that their earnings per shift varies with their fertility. The more fertile they are, the more they make. It’s unknown if the customers directly sense estrus, or if the dancer behaves differently. (from New Scientist)

The Canadian dollar has recently reached par with the US dollar. There was much hullabaloo in the Canadian press about the dollar’s growing strength. Being a bit of curmudgeon, I decided to check the historic value of the loonie. I was a little

The Data

Videe Figure 1: Various currencies expressed in terms of the Canadian dollar. The Austrian dollar bubbles around C$1, the euro does the same around C$1.50, and the pound hangs out around C$2.25 (the yen, scaled up 50 times is equally static). Meanwhile, the greenback spends 1997-2003 at about C$1.50, until the start of 2003, when it starts a slow downward slide from C$1.50 to its current value.

Now turn your gaze to Figure 2: The US dollar’s rate from October 1985 to mid-October 2007. A gradual fall from early ’85, turning around at the start of ’92, and gradually increasing until about 2003, at which point it slumps to the current value.

Data acquired from the Bank of Canada and OANDA. All rates are interbank rates. Data and scripts used to generate graphs are available for download.

Conclusions

1. The Canadian dollar is not increasing in value – the yardstick we measure it against is gradually shrinking.
2. While the four currencies shown in Figure 1 seem to be holding their value, the US dollar has lost 30% of its value since 2003.
3. For some reason, 2003 seems like a particularly bad year for the US. I wonder what epic screw-up started then and is continuing into the present day?