Interesting Links for 31-03-2014

[andrewducker]

• Beer! Cures! Cancer!
  (tags: cancer beer )
• The problem with Moffat
  (tags: StevenMoffat writing )
• UK will finally allow citizens to legally rip CDs (and quote people!)
  (tags: uk copyright )
• 'Game Of Thrones' Cast Hits The Beach, Poses For The Best Photo Ever Taken
  (tags: gameofthrones photos )
• Having an animator for a dad is, unsurprisingly, awesome

Comments

[simont]

rebalancing the books has to have some sort of consent involved

Yes. Another failure mode is where your £5 debt to the person at the desk next to you suddenly gets reassigned to someone much harder to get in contact with (e.g. a mostly-teleworker); you want whoever borrowed from the hard-to-reach person in the first place to have to bear the inconvenience of arranging to pay it back, which is a much more important factor than the fiver itself.

The last shared house I lived in had (and, with me long gone, still has) a similar sort of mechanism for tracking debts, only instead of growing out of a coffee ordering system it grew out of the system for remembering who owes how much toward the next lot of bills and rent. More or less any casually incurred debt between housemates (typically of the form 'oh, if you're going to the shop, can you get me an X while you're there') can be resolved just by adjusting the balances of the two people involved, and then you never even need to worry about who you pay back, it just all comes out in the wash the next time you do a bank transfer into the bill-paying account.

[andrewducker]

Oh yes, I've done that. You can easily wobble back and forth over amounts of money for ages, never quite balancing things out - and sometimes being quite glad that you have £10 available at the bank of Dave if you ever have an emergency!