elbales

Paperback Swap is one of those cool new economy things where an old-fashioned idea, that of swapping, gets a modern update. You post books you'd be willing to mail to people; in return, you get credits and can request books for other people to mail to you. All you pay for is the postage. I've posted eleven books this evening; one's already set to be mailed as soon as I can get to the post office, and four others have been requested and are just waiting for confirmation that the requesters have enough credits for the books. I know it does happen that people sometimes get burned, but the members are mostly pretty cool.

Reminds me a little of Bruce Sterling's short story "Maneki Neko" from his collection A Good Old-Fashioned Future. Only in that case, the protagonist's PDA is arranging his contributions to a computer-mediated gift economy, and others' PDAs are doing the same thing.

ETA: Almost forgot: If you decide to sign up, I'd be obliged if you'd give them my name as a referrer, as I get credits whenever someone signs up because I referred them. You can give them my e-mail address; if you need it, e-mail or comment and I'll send it to you. (Scraping = DNW.)
 

Here's an excerpt of a posting from thinkprogress.org, ganked from the lovely kiri_l.
( Big government for great justice!! )
God. The 109th Congress really pisses me off. They play the child porn card while ignoring the real work. GO DO SOMETHING CONSTRUCTIVE, YOU DUMB FUCKS. Like... work on fixing Medicare! Jesus.