[doodah]

Hi, I'm back again. I was curious to see what has transpired here. I like your civic ideas a lot and hope once you start it, they will catch on and other merchants will pick them up. I hope you get lots of news coverage about this, too, as nothing helps put the idea before the public eye like TV. It warms my heart to see TV used to promote good -- using their own tool for a different purpose!

I had a few thoughts/questions.

1. You say you're not gonna lie down in a field until we cross galactic center. I, however, am headed to the field and plan to stay there, not lying down, but growing food. So ... is this, sort of, divergence in thinking a result of location? I already live in the country. Do you live in a town or city?

2. Is money a more urgent issue in cities? I'm almost beginning to think so. Because out in the country people have stuff to barter, real stuff, like eggs or horsepower.

3. I'm wondering if money originated in cities because of the above, but the system spread out to encompass even the people who didn't need it, ie, those living in the country.

4. In my vision of the future, all large urban areas are disbanded and the population redistributed across the continents. The reason for this is many-fold. Cities are not sustainable in the face of any kind of emergency or lack. They become traps. They are also drains on energy and resources, and are pollution centers in our modern world. Because people have left the countryside, usually because of money, a vacuum was created whereby Corporate farming moved in. And now, especially people in cities are the victims of GM foods, pesticides, and pollution created to move all that food into the cities. [Actually, I believe this has been a deliberate plan, but that's another thread.] All the rest of us are also the victims of that, but people in the country have the best chance of providing alternatives for themselves.

5. Some communities are using their own local money, which I think is a good idea because it has locally-assigned value. More decentralization. Good.

6. Globalization was a very bad idea. Everything is so spread out and interconnected now -- but dependent upon fossil fuels to reconnect the parts, such as getting overseas products to stores worldwide, or those bananas into supermarkets in Canada in midwinter -- that it can all come crashing down at once, as a unit. Globalization has weakened us rather than strengthened us. This can only have been a deliberate plan, but that is also another thread.

7. Money invested ... too bad so many are invested in the stock market and such. Apparently this was the same scenario before the big crash in the early 20th century - people got a little prosperous then got greedy and were lured into the stock market, which is not a free market but a controlled form of gambling. Researchers say The Crash was a deliberate and manipulated event, but here we are again today. Nobody really learned the lesson because most people really didn't know the truth. Most still don't.

I think most of this is at least vaguely related to ideas about money, so I hope it isn't offensive to have this here. If so, I will apologize again!

Best wishes to you in your bookstore endeavor.