Tag Archive
Living the Robot-Mediated Life
It turns out people are pretty morbidly fascinated by Bethany Soule’s and my auction-based lifestyle. After Bethany’s Messy Matters article, “Love and/or Money,” it was »
Yootles Postmortem
I introduced the social currency (or scrip) Yootles in 2006 with the (needless to say, quixotic) goal of changing the social norms about money. We had two specific reasons for an alternative currency: We wanted to run prediction markets and needed a way around anti-gambling laws in the US Many people find the idea of using money... »
For Love and/or Money: Financial Autonomy in Marriage
This is a guest post by Bethany Soule with assistance from Daniel Reeves. Prescript: We realize how crazy this all sounds! Nonetheless, we’re perfectly serious, and do actually pay each other to put our kids to bed and whatnot. We think we have quite clever mechanisms for deciding who does what and keeping things... »
Stochastic, Nerdtastic Restaurant Bill Splitting
We have worked out what we believe is the fastest fair way to split a restaurant bill! You know what the state of the art is like so this is quite a breakthrough. To be clear about the “fastest fair way” it helps to compare to the extremes. First, the slowest fair way to split a... »
Extremely Weak Cryptography: Rot13 for Numbers
The idea of rot13 is to obscure text, for example, to prevent spoilers. It's not meant to be cryptographically secure but simply to make sure that only people who are sure they want to read something will read it. "It's handy when coordinating by text message when one or both parties are about to get... »