Glad the Norris link was helpful. Still hope you check out the"Skills of Xanadu" links... Yeah, it's hard to know when to "barge" and when not to...
Your County Currency link was off, but I found this:
http://countycurrency.org/
Reminds me a bit of LETS:
http://www.lets-linkup.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Although, from the fist link: "Don't think of LETS points like dollars. Think of them as favours. LETS Favours. ... The LETS group's function is to act as a bookkeeper for their members' activities; keeping record of these 'favours' and putting the members' accounts into debit or credit accordingly. An account that is in credit identifies a member who has given more favours than he has received, and an account that is in debit identifies a member who has received more favours than he has given. These credits have no value and cannot be exchanged for cash. Their only purpose is to keep track of each member's involvement in the group so they can aim to bring their accounts back to zero -- a sign of fair and equitable participation in the system. ..."
And:
http://banknd.nd.gov/
"Welcome to Bank of North Dakota (BND). As the only state-owned bank in the nation, we act as a funding resource in partnership with other financial institutions, economic development groups and guaranty agencies."
Although they presumably don't issue currency except as debt like any other conventional bank. But one can wonder how far debt lending could go at he state level these days with Fed support.
See also on having adequate currency as the cause of the American Revolution (assuming it is true):
"How Benjamin Franklin Caused the Revolutionary War"
http://www.opednews.com/articl...
Jane Jacobs was big on cities having their own currencies. She especially values currency fluctuations between cities as markers of how well cities were doing processes like import replacement. She pointed out how national currencies could hurt most cities (while perhaps benefiting the capital city). Reading her work, I realized how the Euro was a big step backwards for most Europeans, especially in a computer age where translating currencies using current values (over a network) was a fairly easy problem to solve technically. The Euro shows the folly of trying to have a common currency without a common form of governance for the people who use it.
When I've thought about currencies, I eventually realized that a currency is implicitly a constitution. It's backed in a sense by an community and is only as strong as the governance of that community, which controls how much of the currency is issued and the official rules for exchange it. When a currency loses value relative to other currencies, it mostly reflects an assessment of the community or its governance that stands behind the currency as a medium of exchange. In that sense, the county currency idea fits a definable unit of governance -- the county.
As for getting back to the countryside with technology, my wife and I moved to the Adirondack park more than ten years ago. When we first arrived we had only dialup, but a couple years after that paid the cable company US$4000 to extend cable about a half mile to us so we could get broadband speeds. Money well spent as far as ROI. It was only computer networking that let us live in such a remote area and still be able to do consulting projects. And dialup speeds were getting more and more problematical, with people sending multi-megabyte files and asking us if we got them, and having to say, well, it will take a couple hours to download... I spent 2.5 years recently supporting NBCUniversal's broadcast operations and writing new software for them to control video routers and their satellite system -- routinely downloading multi-gigabyte log files and only needing to go to NYC for the day maybe a dozen or so times over that time. So, I guess I got to live that dream. :-) Well, ignoring I'd rather have been developing software for more decentralized systems. :-(
I'm not sure living in the countryside does much for demographics though. Industrial society, whether in urban, suburban, town, or rural areas, provides so many distractions while raising the cost of having a kid so high that population growth rates are falling in all such places. Italy is a worst case along with Japan, but the USA is pretty much only still growing based on immigration. Here is something I wrote on that (in part to rebut concerns over Peak Oil etc.):
"[p2p-research] Peak Population crisis (was Re: Japan's Demographic Crisis)"
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...
BTW, I just spent about five hours working with my kid (who did the artwork and provided domain design advice) and making a crude browser-based 2D multi-player tank battle toy in JavaScript (both on the browser and with a NodeJS server using socket.io for the networking). I call it a toy as there is no collision detection, score, login ids, or many other features -- and still known bugs like when people reconnect and leave ghost tanks. So, nowhere near WOT (which we play a lot) but I thought it would be a fun learning experience for him and me to do together. Some things have gotten so much easier over the years -- yet another way automation is reducing the need for "jobs" :-) We just put it up on GitHub:
"TanksInYourBrowser"
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
I have a copy of this book, so maybe we'll get to 3D multi-player eventually: :-)
"3D Game Programming for Kids: Create Interactive Worlds with JavaScript (Pragmatic Programmers)"
http://www.amazon.com/Game-Pro...
"You know what's even better than playing games? Creating your own. Even if you're an absolute beginner, this book will teach you how to make your own online games with interactive examples. You'll learn programming using nothing more than a browser, and see cool, 3D results as you type. You'll learn real-world programming skills in a real programming language: JavaScript, the language of the web. You'll be amazed at what you can do as you build interactive worlds and fun games."
Anyway, thanks for helping get all that started! :-)