Book Review: "Medici Money" by Tim Parks

I've recently read the book Medici Money by Tim Parks. It's a book that covers the rise, consolidation of money and power, and downfall of the Medici banking family in Florence in the 15th century. It focuses on the main players in the Medici family as they relate to their banking business, and how that business grew, became intertwined in politics & religion, and was able to fund the collection & creation of artworks and other cultural artifacts; the whole story is just a long power play, with jockeying between Medici family members, popes & cardinals, politicians, and competing nobility & business interests.

The book itself is a well-written, engaging, fun jaunt through that period in history; by the fact that it only has a casual section at the end containing bibliographic notes, without having a formal bibliography, footnotes, or endnotes, I can tell this was written for popular rather than technical/academic consumption, which I can appreciate. It was particularly interesting to see the tensions, contradictions, and hypocrisies of the Catholic Church's views on usury (in the old sense of lending money at any nonzero interest rate) explored fully in this book: the argument is that usury allowed ordinary people to become wealthy without needing to inherit it or work as hard, upending the social order, while the Catholic Church depended on usury to fund its own wars & extravagant lifestyles even as it condemned the practice (though even people at that time struggled to find coherent Biblical justifications for injunctions against usury), leading to weird debates about whether some commercial practices like speculation on currency exchanges were really usury in disguise. My only quibble is that the author ties the notion of usury too much to currency: the way I see it, currency simply liquefies commercial value across space (i.e. making value available across different geographic areas), while usury liquefies commercial value across time (i.e. making value available to future buyers), so while currency certainly makes usury much more feasible by combining liquidity in space and time, it is conceivable to imagine usury without currency, simply through bonds between people expecting greater future returns to be settled through consensual barter. Overall, I think this book could be an interesting and fun history for a general audience.

How the Economics of Rewards Relates to Open Source

As I just noticed, this is post #10000000_2, #80_16, or #200_8! (The underscore separates the number (on the left) from the base system (on the right).)
I got the idea for this post from a video embedded in an article on the website The Linuxologist. It deals with how incentives affect people's performance - specifically the incentive of a higher reward for better performance. Follow the jump to read the rest.

FOLLOW-UP: Is the National Honors Society still about Honor[insert suffix here]?

I intended to include a promise at the end of the original post about the certainty of a follow-up. I forgot to include that line, but here it is anyway.
I am staying in NHS. I asked the coordinator (in a strictly nonconfrontational way) my questions and got satisfactory answers.
First, the membership fee is nothing new. Apparently, the membership fee and the second (spring) Cookie Dough sale are needed to cover operating costs, and even then, we barely keep any of the money.
Second, there is no requirement to actually bring a friend to the Mini-Walk. The only requirement is that said friend pay the same fee to participate. Bringing a friend is just strongly encouraged, but there is no punishment (explicit or otherwise) for not doing this.
Next, I got the impression that the coordinator and the professional liaison only wanted focus on money rather than the actual target of charity. This is because the target actually isn't specific. The first (fall) Cookie Dough sales will go through KenyaConnect (as it always has) to go to villages in Kenya. Last year, they could give specifics because conditions were alright to commit to specific projects (i.e. school chairs and tables, water tanks, gates and fences). This year, with the drought and famine (for the last 8 months) in Kenya, it is still unclear to even KenyaConnect as to how exactly the money will be allocated. That's why the focus was more on actually raising the money itself.
Finally, I did not get a chance to ask about Windows on used computers, but I plan to later on.
Also, some other things that the NHS does is help out with the Children's Inn at NIH, various senior nursing homes, and other things.
This all is enough to convince me that the NHS is a (mostly) charitable fundraising organization, and that's enough to make me stay.

Is the National Honors Society still about Honor[insert suffix here]?

Today there was a National Honors Society meeting in our school after school.
NHS is supposed to be an organization dedicated to (from the website) "Scholarship, Service, Leadership, and Character".
(From the website,) Members must be morally upright, set an example for peers, and perform service for the betterment of the community without regard to money.
Yet this is not what I saw on display at today's meeting. All I saw was talk about money, moolah, and more bucks.
For one, this is the first year that the NHS at our school has instituted a $10 membership fee. Why? Have operating costs skyrocketed so much that fundraisers explicitly for the club (i.e. the Spring Cookie Dough sale) can't cover them? If so, that's understandable. If not, I'm wondering if NHS is any longer about service, charity, or being non-profit.
While the next thing is nothing new, I am still puzzled as to why the coordinator and executive board members require those participating in the Mini-Walk for the homeless to bring another non-member student and that those non-member students should also pay fees.
First of all, what's wrong with just bringing a friend who doesn't want to go to the Walkathon in DC? It's great to encourage friends to also come to the Walkathon, but I think mandating friends to come for this is going a bit too far.
Second, why must a non-member friend come too? Again, encouraging people to bring friends and donate to the homeless is great, but a lot of people I know who are going are already in NHS. What's wrong with walking with them?
While all of the funds go to the actual Walkathon, I am still suspicious about this sort of authoritarian attitude towards this event. It's supposed to be fun, but it's starting to look less like that now.
Next, the attitude displayed by the coordinator and by the professional liaison for fundraising was a bit disappointing. Rather than focus on the target of the fundraising (i.e. Kenyan schools and villages), the focus was just on the fundraising itself and the prizes. Why?
The only other beef I have is with the computer drive in that the computers have Windows on them. My problem is that they are quickly going to break down, and the recipients of these computers will have very little skills to fix them and will probably have to pay exorbitant prices to computer professionals to have the job done. This, of course, is only based upon what I know about the program; I'm unsure of all of the details, so this is a story for another day. This is just a preliminary thought (i.e. about the old computers).
Thus, it seems to me that the NHS is being motivated more by profit than by actual community benefit. It's making me doubt the philosophy behind the organization.
I'm planning to get all of these questions answered tomorrow before giving the checks for NHS fees and for the Mini-Walk. If the answers are satisfactory, I'll stay. If not, sayonara, NHS!