The story of how four drinking buddies saved Brazil by creating a currency that didn’t exist. A fascinating primer on how money really works.
The four economists wanted to create a new currency that was stable, dependable and trustworthy. The only catch: This currency would not be real. No coins, no bills. It was fake.
“We called it a Unit of Real Value — URV,” Bacha says. “It was virtual; it didn’t exist in fact.”
People would still have and use the existing currency, the cruzeiro. But everything would be listed in URVs, the fake currency. Their wages would be listed in URVs. Taxes were in URVs. All prices were listed in URVs. And URVs were kept stable — what changed was how many cruzeiros each URV was worth.
Say, for example, that milk costs 1 URV. On a given day, 1 URV might be worth 10 cruzeiros. A month later, milk would still cost 1 URV. But that 1 URV might be worth 20 cruzeiros.
The idea was that people would start thinking in URVs — and stop expecting prices to always go up.
“We didn’t understand what it was,” says Maria Leopoldina Bierrenbach, a housewife from Sao Paulo. “I used to say it was a fantasy, because it was not real.”
Still, people used URVs. And after a few months, they began to see that prices in URVs were stable. Once that happened, Bacha and his buddies could declare that the virtual currency would become the country’s actual currency. It would be called the real. (Source: NPR).
Nod to @anclove for the link.
Source: NPR
A collection of photographs of my grandfather, Leslie Levi Fogg taken between 1978 and 1980 in Stockport, England. My grandfather was a hatter and he had hands like dustbin lids. He made felt hats by hand for his entire working life. In order to shape the felt to the mould, he would need to place his hands in boiling water without using any protective gloves. In the early 1980s, work place safety regulation was introduced which banned the process of making felt hats by hand, making my grandfather one of the last people in the world to produce top hats and Trilbies this way.
Hat makers had been around for centuries. Their profession was once part of the fabric of British industrial society. Their process even coined a famous phrase…
“Mad as a hatter” is a colloquial phrase used in conversation to refer to a crazy person. In 18th and 19th century England mercury was used in the production of felt, which was used in the manufacturing of hats common of the time. People who worked in these hat factories were exposed daily to trace amounts of the metal, which accumulated within their bodies over time, causing some workers to develop dementia caused by mercury poisoning. Thus the phrase “Mad as a Hatter” became popular as a way to refer to someone who was perceived as insane. (Source: Wikipedia).
Source: Flickr / danielfogg
Mr. Wolf (Taken with instagram)
A nice look at how design can change peoples experience of their world.
Showing a series of inspiring, unusual and playful products, British branding and design guru Paul Bennett explains that design doesn’t have to be about grand gestures, but can solve small, universal and overlooked problems.
I was put onto this by a creative friend of mine. Some interesting points, well told.
Simon Waterfall’s “10 point ride into fact + fiction, today + tomorrow, truth + lies” filmed live on 20 September 2011 in front of an audience of creative guests at Arup’s first Penguin Pool event in London. Brief introduction from Tristram Carfrae, Arup Fellow and Chair of Building Design.
Filmed and edited by Arup’s in-house film team.
Gettin digits (@unklekay / @jamesclar) (Taken with Instagram at Satellite)
Ping pong (@jamesclar) (Taken with Instagram at Satellite)
D aka @essarai (Taken with Instagram at Satellite)
Satellite Street #tiltshift (Taken with Instagram at Satellite)
Lisa's Things: Ferret at the supermarket
A lovely little thing courtesy of lisr:
Today I saw a little girl of about six years old walking out of the supermarket with a ferret on a lead. I did a double take and wondered how she could be sure that the ferret couldn’t escape, since there was just a single harness around its middle.
My mum always warned me about ferrets. She’s very anti-ferrets. When she was a little girl she patted a ferret at a fair. You know the type of fair, the ones that drive into town and pitch up on a field for a week, offering clouds of candy floss and stomach churning thrill rides of dubious safety. The kind of fairs that you meet boys at when you’re thirteen and still too young to sneak into the pub.
The ferret bit my mum’s finger in that true cartoon fashion where they clamp their teeth in to the bone and lock their jaws. Where you wildly thrash your arm around, desperately shrieking for someone to GET IT OFF GETITOFFGETITOOOOOOOFFF.
I tried to reason with my mum that maybe not all ferrets are like that. Maybe that particular one was sick of travelling with the fair, never having a place to call home and living off stale candy floss and toffee apples.
Seeing that ferret today, scampering along like a furry land-eel while the little girl chatted to it, I hoped that if you give a ferret a happy home you get a happy ferret.
Source: lisr
Creek #tiltshift (Taken with instagram)
Street life #tiltshift (Taken with Instagram at Dubai Healthcare City)
Eating fish (Taken with instagram)
Flower! (Taken with instagram)
For hire #bicycles #yeah (Taken with instagram)
Some things I see and some things you don't...
