Comments on: I want my five dollars back?

I want my five dollars back?

|n$eCur3 — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:07:47 -0800

Fivedollarcomparison.org is a collaborative photo project designed by a number of Nokia researchers to understand the buying power of 5 dollars across the world. The goal of this project is vague: to understand how culture, context and communication might change the world. Post your own example here. Sample photo.

By: infini

infini — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:30:15 -0800

Thank you for posting this, Insecure (sorry I'm feeling a tad lazy to do the special characters) - i'm doing research on values and buyer behaviour at the bottom of the pyramid and this is perfect!

By: porn in the woods

porn in the woods — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:36:40 -0800

Site's moving slowly enough to think it's being served on a $5 Commodore 64.

By: Zambrano

Zambrano — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:49:05 -0800

It's the healthy version of The Economist's Big Mac Index.

By: Saxon Kane

Saxon Kane — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:22:41 -0800

How many pictures of Subway and Quizno's footlongs?

By: BrotherCaine

BrotherCaine — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:17:45 -0800

Well, there's a grainy picture of a footlong in a back alley attached to a tranny, but I don't think it's a sandwich.

By: Justinian

Justinian — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:26:18 -0800

Well, there's a grainy picture of a footlong in a back alley attached to a tranny, but I don't think it's a sandwich. I am trying so, so hard not to make a joke involving buns.

By: 5MeoCMP

5MeoCMP — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:13:12 -0800

I think they paid about $5 for bandwidth ...

By: UbuRoivas

UbuRoivas — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:49:50 -0800

$5 in Burma would buy me a clean private hotel room for the night, with ensuite, fresh towels & sheets, and a breakfast consisting of eggs done however, toast, butter & jam, as much coffee as I wanted, cordial, a few kinds of fresh fruit, a little cake & sometimes an avocado as big as a football.

By: jimmythefish

jimmythefish — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:19:20 -0800

Five dollars = jokey comments on blue website for life!

By: Sam.Burdick

Sam.Burdick — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:54:42 -0800

Metafilter: I'd buy that for five dollars!

By: UbuRoivas

UbuRoivas — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 22:05:43 -0800

Five dollars = jokey comments on blue website ~~for life!~~ until bannination!

By: Dreama

Dreama — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:55:34 -0800

It would be nice if their oh-so-cutting edge javascript gallery didn't make it impossible to read some of the explanations. Simplicity is sometimes a good thing. (So is not breaking Flickr's TOS.)

By: Mutant

Mutant — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:55:25 -0800

Ah very interesting site. Curious that they selected five dollars as their reference point, as we know that there are roughly one billion people living on one dollar a day or less [.pdf]. And the same source shows that an alarming forty percent of the planet's population lives on two dollars a day or less! Still an interesting experiment though - thanks for posting.

By: seanmpuckett

seanmpuckett — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 04:32:19 -0800

Five dollars bought just enough of my time at $65/hr to move past loathing the achingly slow and precious slide show interface into burning hatred for web designers who don't actually use their own product. Pretty good deal, actually. I often don't bother to hang around past "this sucks."

By: mrmojoflying

mrmojoflying — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 05:07:32 -0800

By: weapons-grade pandemonium

weapons-grade pandemonium — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:44:47 -0800

You want to execute your great concent quickly, so it doesn't suffer.

By: binturong

binturong — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:50:15 -0800

Well in Zimbabwe, $100 billion will buy you less than half a loaf of bread. The government just printed a $100bn note but is now worried they cannot get any more currency paper. People must line up at a bank for hours to get their daily withdrawal allowance which doesn't even cover the cost of their time lining up. And you thought you had inflation problems.

By: Who_Am_I

Who_Am_I — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 07:04:37 -0800

Well it's an interesting idea, I wish the site would load so I could check it out. I don't remember who started it, but it's now a thing among me and my friends that when you start telling a pointless story that just keeps going, you can wrap it up with "then I found five dollars." At least that way it has some sort of closure. So the other morning I woke up to find my kitchen overrun with fruit flies, mostly focused on the garbage which was overdue. I set out a glass of vinegar and dish detergent (which really works BTW), got the infested trash out to the dumpster, and on the way back inside actually found five dollars! I think I spent it on coffee, which isn't as cool as this, but is way better than this.

By: infini

infini — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 04:52:44 -0800

What a great concent, and horrible, horrible execution. What use is a bunch of decontextualized pictures? Where are these pictures from? When were they taken? What are they of? I don't just want to *see* the purchasing power of $5, I want to know something about it. Too bad someone couldn't do this in a more useful way for the curious. posted by mrmojoflying Agree on the slow loading speed, disagree on the execution. The photo's are decontextualized, i'm hazarding a guess, because Nokia Design would like to share but not give away everything they've prolly invested in this project. They'll do their own analysis based on their existing knowledge. Their list of people involved includes Jan Chipchase, and I'd bet he could just figure shit out based on sorting it by country and date (which is why they've not shared that info on the site maybe?) Although it jsut struck me that flickr captures the date the photo was taken and prolly being tagged by country too. Otoh, if there's anyone reading from Nokia, I'd suggest using 5 local currency units and the date purchased, imho, that'd be more relevant as PPP changes - also as someone has pointed out, there's a billion or more living on less than a $1 a day plus the dollar is losing value.