The man who lives without money

Mark Boyle gave up using cash over a year ago and loves his new lifestyle.

By Jessica Salter

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Mark Boyle, the moneyless man

Mark Boyle, 31, gave up using money in November 2008. He lives in a caravan that he got from Freecycle (uk.freecycle.org), which is parked at an organic farm near Bristol, where Boyle volunteers three days a week. He grows his own food, has a wood-burning stove and produces electricity from a solar panel (it cost £360 before the experiment started). He has a mobile phone for incoming calls only and a solar-powered laptop. Boyle, who has been vegan for six years, set up the Freeconomy in 2007 (justfortheloveofit.org), an online network that encourages people to share skills or possessions and now has 17,000 members. The Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomic Living (Oneworld Publications, £10.99) is out now.

It all started in a pub. My friend and I were talking about all the problems in the world, such as sweatshops, environmental destruction, factory farms, animal testing, wars over resources. I realised they were all, in their own way, connected to money.

I decided to give up cash. I sold my houseboat in Bristol and gave up my job at an organic food company. I made a list of everything I bought and tried to figure out which I could get in another way. For toothpaste I use a mixture of cuttlefish bone and wild fennel seeds. Things like iPods you just have to knock off the list, but birds in the trees around my kitchen have become my new iPod.

Everything takes more time and effort in a moneyless world. Handwashing my clothes in a sink of cold water, using laundry liquid made by boiling up nuts on my rocket stove, can take two hours, instead of half an hour using a washing machine.

It was meant to be just for a year but I enjoy the lifestyle so much that I’m just going to keep living like this. I’ve never been happier or fitter.

I had a very normal childhood. I think at first my parents wondered what on earth I was doing. But now they totally support me and they say that they may even try it themselves.

Sometimes it is frustrating trying to socialise with no money. I grew up in Northern Ireland where it’s a show of manliness to buy your mates the first round. But I invite them back to my caravan instead to have homemade cider around the campfire.

I am single at the moment, but because of the book and my blog a few women seem interested in me. Just being a vegan cuts down the number of women I’m compatible with, never mind being moneyless. I’ll be lucky if there’s one woman in the whole country who wants to give up cash for life – and I might not even fancy her.

New Amish Automobile Revealed!

by MrAngry
from http://www.ridelust.com
 

Now tell me this thing doesn’t look like a futuristic Mini-van. Seriously, I could have totally seen Harrison Ford rocking this thing in the movie Blade Runner with a few child seats in the back. What we have here is a very interesting vehicle that has been designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to train Mr. Ed.




Based out of Istanbul, Turkey, Kurtsystems has developed this training car to remove the human element out of training horses… or camels for that matter. According to the Kurtsystems website the Kurtsystems Car can be used for: “on-track or off-track use suitable for racehorses, trotters, endurance and camel training fully adjustable and controlled speeds from walking pace to galloping at up to 16m/sec (60 km/h). Safe controlled training programs and performance evaluation. Confirm training intensity, with built-in hearth rate monitors. Allows trainers carry out regular fitness tests and comparisons.”
Ok, the wording may be a bit off but hey, they’re from Istanbul so cut them a break.



Now, I have no idea if this sucker is available to the U.S. market but if it is I can tell you that the Amish would be buying these bad boys by the boat load. Just picture little Ezekiel and Jebediah cruising along with Mom & Dad in the families’ standard open-air buggy. Then out of nowhere older brother Amos and his main squeeze Mildred come trotting down to the farm in their new Kurtsystems Car.


They’d obviously be sporting the Amish approved one-horsepower drive train complete with automated reigns and barn busting bumper guards. They’d be new trendsetters in the neighborhood and the talk of the Church.

At least that’s how I envision it anyway. Either way though this thing is pretty cool – hmm… I wonder if I could do a Mr. Angry Edition.

Amish face crisis of faith

Joe Raymond/Associated Press

An Amish couple passed by a plant in Nappanee, Ind. "Most people say they're tightening their belts. Well, we don't use belts, so I guess … we're tightening up our suspenders," a deacon said of Amish job losses.

Raylee Hayes, 5, rode a wooden horse rocker at a store in Nappanee. Amish deacon Lester Chupp said business is down about 40 percent from a year ago

Job losses force Hoosiers to choose money or tradition By Tom Coyne Associated Press TOPEKA, Ind. -- A part-time construction job strengthened Orva Fry's financial foundation after he was laid off from a recreational vehicle factory. It also kept the 41-year-old Amish father of two on steady spiritual ground. Another way to make ends meet that Fry briefly considered -- unemployment checks -- went against his faith, which shuns all forms of government assistance. That Fry even pondered signing up for jobless benefits illustrates a marked shift in this Northern Indiana Amish settlement, the nation's third-largest. Suffering steep unemployment following a decades-long shift from farming to factory work, a growing number of the area's 23,000 Amish are breaking with centuries of tradition and taking government help to stay afloat, church and economic leaders say. Bishops who once might have censured those who sought public assistance are reluctantly looking the other way. "We prefer to supply ourselves, but I told people that if they have no other option and no other way to make ends meet then they can take it," said Paul Hochstetler, bishop of an Amish district east of Goshen. Of more than two dozen Amish approached recently in Topeka, a town of 1,100 about 40 miles southeast of South Bend, only six would talk of the unemployment situation, and all were reluctant to be identified. The unemployment rate in the Elkhart-Goshen metropolitan area approached 19 percent in March -- the most recent month for which data are available -- in large part due to the misfortune of RV factories that have laid off thousands of workers. It is the nation's fourth-highest unemployment rate and is up 13 points from March 2008, the country's largest increase. The Amish's refusal to take assistance such as unemployment and welfare is shared by like-minded Anabaptist traditions that grew out of 16th-century German sects that sought to separate themselves from the world, said John Farina, an associate professor of religious studies at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. That would include Hutterians, the Church of the Brethren and the Church of the United Brethren. It's part of a simpler way of life for the Amish, a Christian denomination with about 227,000 members nationwide that uses bicycles or horse-drawn buggies instead of owning cars and avoids connecting to the electrical grid because of a belief that doing so will lead to a dependence on the outside world. "We want to be producers, to be an overall good to the community and to the nation and not be dependent upon the nation for our livelihood or for the federal or state governments to give us our livelihood," said David Kline, an Amish minister in Mount Hope, Ohio, whose county has the nation's largest Amish population. For centuries, that has meant taking care of their own, supplying food, shelter and other necessities in times of need. Those who seek outside help can risk being forced to make public confessions in church or told to refrain from taking communion for six months, said Steven Nolt, a Goshen College history professor who has written several books on the Amish. But tradition has had to bend as Northern Indiana's Amish continue to move away from their roots, becoming heavily reliant on a single industry. A survey of 3,358 Amish heads of households in Indiana's Elkhart-LaGrange settlement in 2007 found that 53.3 percent earned their living working in factories. In contrast, the economies of the nation's largest Amish centers -- the Holmes County area of Ohio and around Lancaster, Pa. -- focus primarily on small shops, construction trades and, to a lesser extent, farming. "When the RV industry shut down here as well as the mobile home industry, it hit them really hard," said LeRoy Mast, director of the Menno-Hof, a nonprofit information center in nearby Shipshewana that teaches visitors about the Amish and Mennonites. "They can't handle the 19 percent unemployment rate on their own because the needs are just so great." Hochstetler said it is impossible for his church district, where about half the 31 families had people employed in the RV industry, to make up the lost wages. The laid-off Amish are eligible to receive jobless benefits of $50 to $390 a week.