Money: It's Worth Money

So I've been poking around this chart provided by NPR. What it is, is a modification of the mainstay cost-of-living index. Those are the things where you see how much it would cost you to live in certain cities. The problem with them, though, is that they don't take into account how much money you get back by working in those cities, or what you might be likely to buy in those cities. And of course annual salaries of those cities don't help either. What you really want is something that will tell you how expensive it's actually going to feel living there. How well off will you be in that town when all is said and done.

The NPR chart does that for 356 American cities classified as metropolitan areas (out of a possible 381), because the Bureau of Economic Activity has also done that, calling it Real Personal Income (RPI). It puts up some scattered notables in dark text- biggest jumps from perception to reality, the most major cities, and the top and bottom of the list- according to median salary and the purchasing power in that town of that salary. The highest RPI belongs to Rochester, Minnesota (instead of highest-incomed Washington DC, dragged into fifth place); the lowest to Bloomington, Indiana (which is also lowest in median salary).

If you're in France, though, your money appears to be worth... 140 characters. Group BPCE is set to allow its customers (with cellphone numbers and French bank accounts) to link their Twitter accounts to the bank's money transfer service. What you'd do is tweet the transfer service, the Twitter account of the recipient, the amount to be sent and then #envoyer (French for send). Now, you're only going to be able to transfer up to 500 euros that way, so it's not like someone can get drunk and tweet away half a million bucks on a misclick, but this can still go very wrong. Probably it will for someone out there.

People do drunk tweet, after all.