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Man Pays For Cross-Country Trip Using Bacon As Currency
An anonymous reader writes in with a story about the power of bacon."Travel can be expensive. One man is using a unique way to pay for a trip as a challenge. Pennsylvania comedian Josh Sankey is on a mission to make a cross-country road trip from New York to Los Angeles with no other currency but bacon. Sankey isn't carrying any cash or credit cards as he makes his cross-country trip. He is paying for everything from gas to lodging by using uncooked bacon as currency. He set off on his trip with 3,000 pounds of the popular meat and he seems to be getting good deals with it so far."
It's a pricey commodity. So much so they're shrinking a lot of the package sizes from 16 to 12 ounces hoping you won't get as much sticker shock. (I had BLT's for dinner, using up some of my tomato bumper crop)
He's going to try this in Israel.
Then Iran.
Now that would be comedy.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The four basic food groups are:
1) Amano Chocolate -- There is no other chocolate.
2) Cream -- Ice Cream, butter, etc.
3) Bacon -- Bacon makes everything better.
4) Foie Gras -- If you haven't tried it, you don't know what you are missing -- really.
All the other foods such as veggies are simply eye candy designed to make you feel good about yourself.
Now try doing that while travelling through the Middle East. Start from Saudi Arabia.
...Josh Sankey refused passage across the Elkhart County border.
Oops.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
'Cause bitcoin is so 2011.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Sadly, I'd give him a night's lodging for a morning's worth of the heavenly fare.
I mean seriously, he's going to travel 3000 miles with nothing but bacon. Sure it's corporate sponsored, but so what?
Go ahead and live the dream!
Bacon - is there anything it can't do?
So good it was banned by two religions.
Is anyone on his team keeping track of the sales taxes on $30,000 worth of bacon-sales?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Someone find him and get a statement.
Can you buy a dinner with Kevin Bacon with bacon?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Er, no - he traded bacon for goods and services. Bacon isn't legal tender and isn't currency. This story can logically be reduced to "Man trades!".
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
Lighten up Francis
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I have a feeling that this will come to an abrupt end once he reaches bear country. The bears are really hungry where I live (in the southwest), which is kind of on the way to L.A.
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
So let me get this straight. Oscar Meyer is giving this guy 3000lbs, which for the sake of argument is $4.99/lb market price. For $15,000 I should hope that he can get across the country in style.
Would be funny if this caught on and others started doing it - what would the Fed do? They cant print bacon! no bacon QE!
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a reference to Godwin's Law approaches 1
He may find that he's divorced when he gets to L.A. "He's always talking about how much he's got but he never brings home the bacon."
If he barters for BitCoin does that make them Bacon BitCoin? Forget gold and silver standards... We need a currency backed by bacon. So when you can't afford food you can go down to your local foodbank and cash it in for a shaker of bacon bits.
3000 pounds of bacon?!? How is he carrying it? And, also, how's he keeping it refrigerated? Don't get me wrong, I think paying for travel with bacon is just as awesome as the next guy, but there are some serious holes in this story.
Would you like a sandwich on that break? Perhaps a BLT?
Sounds like a waste of a good fork if there's bacon around.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
which leg or arm?
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
I hear for an encore he's going to try the same thing in Saudi Arabia.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Just convert the car to biodiesel, and you'll have free fuel every time you cook breakfast.
I hope he keeps good records. The services he trades for bacon are considered "barter income," and are taxable at fair market rates.
I want to be this man and do something strange and wild like this, but will it work with puppies and kittens? How about chocolate? I'm sure lots of people would go for the chocolate.
This is a Mac, what you have there is an embarrassment to your fellow computer users.
The real question is how far would he be able to get on bacon if he were to use it as fuel. I'm pretty sure he could burn the melted fat for fuel, and if he could get a mile a pound he'd might make it... He'd have to sleep in a car full of bacon (resisting the temptation to eat it) and pulling the extra weight across the country might make it unfeasible.
It's not real, much like their food products.
Wright brand Steak Cut Bacon. These incredible slabs of savory pork come six slices to the 20oz package, and are perfect for slow grilling. Bacon so thick that if you want, you can have it crispy on one side, and chewy on the other.
No, I don't work for the company.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Then again, maybe that's the plan. Without refrigeration, the first day with a ton of bacon is a hard sell. After that, they just pay you to go away.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
imagine a letter B with 2 wavy vertical lines to symbolize the bacon strips
Of course, the fact that he's being followed around by a film crew has nothing to do with his success at bartering his bacon. That's a pretty ridiculous stunt. He might as well just go up to all these people and say, "Hey, if you'll give me decent seats to this game, I'll let my film crew here get a clip of you handing me the tickets and you might wind up on national TV!"
So this is what they mean when he 'brings home the bacon' ?
Unless bacon is ridiculously cheap in the US, it sounds like a pretty expensive trip to me. 3000 pounds of bacon would easily cost about 10000 dollars. Seems like a lot of money to go cross-country. I'm sure you can go cross-country much cheaper than that.
That's the new online currency using virtual bacon.
Someone help me find one bridge or another to bring us to Bacon Blues.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
...does one lug around a ton and a half of bacon? And without stopping somewhere and just gorging on the stuff?
Life, ultimately, boils down to the Four Fs: Fighting, Fleeing, Feeding, and Mating.
It is difficult carrying all that bacon around. He should just use FBRN's since you can exchange them for real bacon at any grocery store. Those people that say the Federal Bacon Reserve is printing more FBRN's than they have bacon in Fort Pork are conspiracy theorists.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
It was a very touchy subject when Israel was created and many considerd it a bad sign for a free state that pork is indeed banned (Israel was supposed to be secular according to some founders, freedom for all, not just Jews). But an exception was made to allow Christian to raise pigs. Historically they are in the north and the farming has grown very intense creating a burden on the environment and creating unsanitary conditions. But any attempt to bring in normal farming regulations that are common in the rest of the world, any such law is seen as a religious attack on a minority group.
So... funny as it may sound, it is right now the Christians in Israel that have the greatest issue with pork... weird eh?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Though this is not a laughing matter, it does belong on this site. The man has cracked the fiat currency, he is the hacker of the economy. If some farmer did it, who actually grows hogs, he'd be able to not pay the income taxes on his sales of bacon and only pay the sales taxes with it, when he transacts.
IRS would have a fit. So would most other gov't agencies, including FDA. He'd be arrested for sure.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
So Sue Lowden was just ahead her time and they laughed at her. Who is laughing now? WHO I ASK YOU, IS LAUGHING?
MY OTHER COMMENTS
I think you just described a certain subset of Apple product buyers too. It shows how closely related we are to the rest of the animal kingdom.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
We mine bacon here on Sugar Mountain Farm. It's all over the surface of our land. Each week we go out and herd some huge pieces back to our delivery truck and load them up. Did it last week and they are at the slaughter house now being changed from four legs to strips as we speak, er, write.
The great thing is ours are on pasture, no commercial grain or hog feed diet, and it produces delicious all natural pork and bacon. Pays the mortgage and beyond.
Since when is bartering illegal? Also, there are always thousands of posts on craigslist like "TRADE PS3 for LAPTOP" etc.
It's food so there is no sales tax in many places. Any places with a sales tax on food? Think of it this way, bacon is an essential basic food. Even vegans want and desperately need bacon. They consider bacon the gateway food back to temptation and meat eating. Two religions have banned bacon because it's sooo good. And it's good for you. What can be more essential than that?
There have been times when bacon was worth more than money, more than a billion German Marks at one point. 1923. Our chief economist Ben Shalom Bernanke is promising to print money to buy back debts so soon bacon may be worth more than money again.
My wife got me a sampler pack from these folks:
http://www.fatherscountryhams.com/products.asp?dept=7
Excellent....I'd had a hard time trading it away.
This story would be a lot more impressive if it wasn't an promotion sponsored by the fine folks in Oscar Meyer's marketing department. Tied in with the earlier GPS-in-a-bar promotion thought up by the fine folks in Cadbury's marketing department, and you gotta wonder if all this recycled marketing material is a result of the recent sale of Slashdot's parent company. I for one am getting tired of slashvertisements and repackaged corporate promotion on this site. Whatever happened to news for nerds?
A friend of mine who is a fireman in Chicago got a visit from these guys. Apparently he hooked the whole firehouse up, using a sizable chunk of said bacon - but probably made a few fans in the process.
Couple of questions:
1) WTF?
2) How is he transporting 3000 lbs of bacon?
3) What the hell does this have to do with Slashdot or technology?
4) Is this because Slashdot is being bought by Dice?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
We need to progressive reforms to save us from this Gilded Age of Bacon Barons!
Pigs are my favourite animal. You can feed them anything and they turn it into bacon.
I hope he keeps good records. The services he trades for bacon are considered "barter income," and are taxable at fair market rates.
You've got it the wrong way around. There are no tax implications to him. He just paid a fair price for goods and service. The providers of the goods and services, however, do need to keep track of the bacon received and report it (right along side all the traditional income) as barter income.
IRS wants a cut of income, if you grow a hog and then use the bacon for trading, IRS will want you to give it their cut of income (pun intended I suppose).
FDA and other agencies will want their cut as well. Going State to State with bacon? Must be in violation of a couple of hundred laws on both federal and State levels.
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I know right? I've seen lots of ads from ladies looking to spend time with gentlemen who can give them a place to stay or help with bills, so I know that must be legal too; after all, it is just bartering.
This plays right into my two theories on solving the problems in the Middle East. Everyone knows that bacon is awesome and makes you happy when you eat it. So, all we need to do is get the imams to declare that bacon is acceptable to eat. The second part is to get the Palestinians to open casinos. Worked pretty well for quite a few native American tribes.
Yeah, but the IRS has a place on your tax return to declare barter transactions. So you can pay appropriate taxes if you choose to be an upstanding citizen. As for the compliance with Federal and State policies regarding food safety, sanitation, etc ... you're on your own.
It's going the wrong way. He's buying goods and services, those have the sales tax. The bacon is the "outbound currency".
Meanwhile receiving free _____ is non-cash income when it gets high enough, and my quick guess was in the $30,000 range.
So I think he needs to trade 10 slabs of bacon for some accounting advice, if alarm bells are going off for lil' ol' me.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
And it seems like a better idea than the one Joshua Flaherty had.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I'm curious as to how long uncooked bacon can last. I mean, sure it's better than attempting this with uncooked steak (much better). I do realize that the meat's been cured, but just how much time does the curing process add on to the amount of time before this bacon is inedible?
Also, where is he putting all of this bacon? I mean if he's carrying around 3,000 pounds of bacon, how is he going to also carry his luggage? Unless he wears bacon clothing -- or the same clothes everyday (or no clothes at all, for that matter) -- I don't see where his clothes are supposed to go. If he's going to a cold climate, I suppose that would solve all problems. The meat would last even longer and he could wear all of his clothes at once to stay warm.
Anyone have any ideas on this? I wouldn't even think to attempt this. I would probably start eating my money. I would cook it first, of course. I would need a really big skillet or something.
http://www.travelerstoday.com/articles/3158/20120925/bacon-barter-josh-sankey-completes-cross-country-trip-using-bacon-as-currency-oscar-meyer-comedian-funny-food-los-angeles-new-york-city-road-trip-sizzle-city-tattoo.htm#GY8sGiimG6CDilJK.99