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… and support sagesex.com in a new and easy way! The nerds among you know already: The Swedish heroes from the Piratebay have had another stroke of genius: Flattr! It’s like Digg with money: Now you can’t just tell everybody what you think is cool on the Web, but also reward and support (flattr!) your favorite projects in a way that is brilliantly simple, secure, and adapted to your personal finance and generosity budgets: fantastic Open Source software, free texts, music, images, video and, of course,  masterful mixed media contributions like sagesex!

It’s very simple: Go to Flattr, register, pre-pay an arbitrary amount via Paypal or credit card, and adjust how much of this money you want to give for the good in the world every month. From then on and everywhere in the Web, you can simply press one of these cute little buttons that you can now see below all our posts, and your monthly contribution will be fairly distributed among all the projects that you have flattrd in this month. Plus, from this moment on you also have the opportunity to have your own contributions to the world’s information culture rewarded by the world. And, as with Digg, you can always see how popular something is by how much it gets flattrd.

You can see, I find this idea beyond brilliant and of course I have begun to flattr my favourites myself (by the way, it would be great to have a wordpress plugin that shows you my favorite things). Flattr is a concrete and well-made utopia that might even make redundant the often talked-about “culture flat rate”. There are still some concessions to grey reality, like the 10% that Flattr keeps (though they are supposed to have promised decreasing this percentage in the future – plus, I like to support the pirates in their lawsuits), the idiotic fees that Paypal/Moneybookers take, or the minimum contribution of 2€/month (which is OK for me, but it could keep a few Indians from taking part in this new world economy). Still I’m hoping and believing that Flattr will be outrageously successful, that it will blur even more the boundaries between producers and consumers, and that it helps bringing free culture to free people without making the producers starve. In this spirit we naturally rejoice deeply if you flattr us.

… and support sagesex.com in a new and easy way! The nerds among you know already: The Swedish heroes from the Piratebay have had another stroke of genius: Flattr! It’s...

Mr. Money goes to Town from sagesex on Vimeo.

sagesex.com presents: Part 6 of the Money Series. In which we finally take to Town (Hanoi, Vietnam) our famous money business cards and the beautiful money suit we acquired in the earlier parts of the series.

Mr. Money goes to Town from sagesex on Vimeo. sagesex.com presents: Part 6 of the Money Series. In which we finally take to Town (Hanoi, Vietnam) our famous money business...

Everybody has an image in their mind when I say Money Suit. We had one tailormade for us. Here are the instructions for doing it yourself: How to get your own Money Suit Step by Step!

Step 1: All you need is money!

Naturally you first need plenty of money. We have already shown you how to procure that in Part 2. As a rule of thumb: For one meter of “fabric” you need about 200 500-Dong-bills, for one shirt and a pair of trousers about 800 of them.

Step 2: Stamp it, baby!

Not only does money alone not make you happy, it also looks a bit boring and shows a clear deficit in hypnotic commands for ARTifying the world. Thus: Stamp it, baby!

Step 3: What you want is what you get!

Now we have to clarify how exactly the final product should look. In our case, for instance, a classical suit with a jacket is out of the question because for the time being we will rather suffer from too much heat than too much cold. So it is a shirt and trousers, light and casual, because we want to wear our money clothes as often as possible. In this step you might also start thinking about the feasability and (dis-)advantages of certain techniques (all made out of money, or rather sewed onto fabric …), but we have found out that it is better to do this together with the tailor of your choice. Therefore:

Step 4: Find the right tailor and have it made!

This is actually the hardest part. It took us a the best part of an afternoon to find the right tailor, and all of this in Hoi An, a city in Vietnam that is known for its more than 300 bespoke tailors. Here are a few practical tips: First of all a city like Hoi An is made for this enterprise. Hong Kong might work as well. It’s important that there are many, many tailors, and cheap ones, if money is a concern.

Never talk to the vendors. They will only waste your time by automatically saying yes to anything you ask and then make you wait half and hour for the actual tailor, who will proceed to tell you it’s either impossible or he’s afraid of the authorities, or both. So ask to see the tailor in person the moment you walk into the door, or leave immediately.

Look for an adventurous and courageous, therefore probably young, tailor who is really into the project and not just into the money. Keep stressing that you love Vietnam, its money, and Uncle Ho. Never give up, among 300 tailors there will be one who is daring enough. Barter for the costs, but be generous. It’s a lot of work, and it’s a special order. Respect your tailor’s wishes if she wants to remain anonymous. Talk about all the details: The make, the technique, the color, the pattern, potential problems … and then let your tailor do his work.

Step 6: Enjoy Your Money Suit!

Here are Julian’s first moments with the new suit. Dig the style! Look at the glitter in his eyes! And wait till you see what happiness you can bring into the world with a money suit in our next episode of The Money Series.

Best Practices and Lessons Learnt

After careful consideration with our tailors we decided against making the suit out of pure money (This might be possible with large denominations from 20,000 Dong on, because these are made from plastic. But I don’t think it feels too good.) and for sewing the bills onto a base fabric, cotton in this case. As expected the suit is extremely sensitive to wrinkling, with the seams breaking open easily. So wear it carefully! It remains to be seen how the final product reacts to washing. Maybe dry cleaning would be better.

Julian thinks that sewing the bills onto the readymade suit was not a particularly good idea of our tailor. He would arrange the bills on the raw fabric, brutally sew them on with through-and-through seams, and then resew the after the cutting. There is a lot of room for experimentation here. We are thinking about using our unique expertise for founding our own brand of tailor made money clothing for wealthy patrons. We’ll keep you posted.

Everybody has an image in their mind when I say Money Suit. We had one tailormade for us. Here are the instructions for doing it yourself: How to get your...

As always we totally agree with our readers. You’re saying you want us to throw money to the masses and it’s done before you had even mentioned it. You say we should grant priviledges to avid readers and here they are, the first Sagesex Reader Awards in 5 categories. Finally your persistence pays. Read the rest of this entry »

As always we totally agree with our readers. You’re saying you want us to throw money to the masses and it’s done before you had even mentioned it. You say...

Since Cambodia we have had this dream: A bag full of money. A million in small bills. In the Money Series we show you how we made this dream come true and what you can do with a lot of money. Ever thought about it?

Read the rest of this entry »

Since Cambodia we have had this dream: A bag full of money. A million in small bills. In the Money Series we show you how we made this dream come...

We have just met Denise again. Denise is Irish. We had met her in HCMC’s funny expat scene. When today in Mui Ne we stepped onto one arbitrary bus among the thousands that go north each day, suddenly she was there again. Yesterday in Mui Ne, Julian met two expats that he had been boozing with some days ago in HCMC. But the greatest miracle happened the day before yesterday: When we dragged out of bed at 9 this once because of the heroic 35th anniversary of Saigon’s liberation, I was singing the beautiful German schlager Wunder gibt es immer wieder (There are miracles again and again). Indeed: When I went down the steps to the living room of our guest house granny, who sat there but Caroline and Anne-Laure, the two French girls we had once met in Rattanakiri, Cambodia, the official end of the world. Among the thousands of guest houses in this city they had actually booked the one remaining room besides ours chez granny. They had been living here for days. It was just our entirely different sleeping rhythm that had kept us apart.

What do these miracles want to tell us? Apart from the realization that the traveller trail in Vietnam is apparently as narrow as the country itself, to me it says a lot about the abundance in the Universe: The world is a benevolent place for those who live in abundance. Read the rest of this entry »

We have just met Denise again. Denise is Irish. We had met her in HCMC’s funny expat scene. When today in Mui Ne we stepped onto one arbitrary bus among...

Executive Summary

Cambodians are poor. Cambodians live in huts. Cambodians drive scooters.

Europeans are rich. Europeans live in houses or flats. Europeans drive Mercedes or Opel.

Cambodian workers earn $20-50 a month. With some casual earnings this is enough for a Cambodian middle class life.

European workers earn 20 times that much. In Europe this mostly makes you belong to the lower classes.

Being poor in Cambodia means not being able to work. Being rich means being able to speak English. Both are rare.

Being poor in Europe means being badly paid. Being rich in Europe means wanting to be rich. Both are common.

Everybody says: The middle class is important; the middle class makes people happy.

Where would there be the broader middle class? Where less envy? Where more contentment?

Read the rest of this entry »

Executive Summary Cambodians are poor. Cambodians live in huts. Cambodians drive scooters. Europeans are rich. Europeans live in houses or flats. Europeans drive Mercedes or Opel. Cambodian workers earn $20-50...