{"id":2601,"date":"2013-11-20T14:19:17","date_gmt":"2013-11-20T19:19:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/?p=2601"},"modified":"2013-11-20T14:19:17","modified_gmt":"2013-11-20T19:19:17","slug":"tithing-tied-to-consumption","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/2013\/11\/20\/tithing-tied-to-consumption\/","title":{"rendered":"Tithing tied to consumption"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A Facebook friend shared this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.whydev.org\/some-bad-news-about-toms-shoes\/\">critique of TOMS shoes<\/a> today and it reminded me that ethical consumerism is kind of a fail in terms of substantial economic or environmental justice. \u00a0However, as much as my consumption has serious consequences, often not felt by me, I still buy stuff. \u00a0Rather than having my &#8220;lesser of two evils&#8221; consumption prescribed by producers, I&#8217;d like to have my consumption offset by pushing resources to strategies that offer the most leverage toward economic justice.<\/p>\n<p>I image a system that integrates with a service like Mint, or other banking API that calculates a tithe as a percentage of my consumption in certain categories. \u00a0This would be weighted based on the harmful externalities associated with a particular type of purchase. \u00a0I think it&#8217;s really difficult and perhaps dangerous to try to model the actual consequences of consumption, but its still important to have a reminder that consumption isn&#8217;t neutral. \u00a0After a certain threshold is reached, I&#8217;d be notified by the system and could then push the calculated tithe to recommended projects, or some other project of my choice. \u00a0As an added feature, I could get recommendations of non-monetary ways (volunteering, taking part in an action, attending a government hearing) \u00a0as a way of fulfilling the &#8220;tithe&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>One technical constraint is how to get access to my spending data. \u00a0I found this <a href=\"http:\/\/webapps.stackexchange.com\/questions\/11398\/does-mint-com-have-an-api-to-download-data-if-not-are-any-scraping-tools-avail\">Stack Exchange thread about Mint APIs<\/a> and this mention of an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/tomgroenfeldt\/2013\/04\/01\/open-bank-api-connects-third-party-apps-like-mint-or-foreign-languages-to-banks\/\">Open Bank<\/a> API.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Facebook friend shared this critique of TOMS shoes today and it reminded me that ethical consumerism is kind of a fail in terms of substantial economic or environmental justice. \u00a0However, as much as my consumption has serious consequences, often not felt by me, I still buy stuff. \u00a0Rather than having my &#8220;lesser of two&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/2013\/11\/20\/tithing-tied-to-consumption\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Tithing tied to consumption<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[628],"tags":[21239,21243,21241,21242,21240],"class_list":["post-2601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideas","tag-banking","tag-economic-justice","tag-mint","tag-tithing","tag-webapp","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4wnIz-FX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2601"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2602,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2601\/revisions\/2602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.terrorware.com\/geoff\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}