Related: diary Mar-28-2011: ConsciousCapitalism.org, BillStArnaud.BlogSpot.com Mar-28-2011: GlobalGuerrillas.TypePad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/11/completely-new-economies-as-a-software-service.html, GlobalGuerrillas.TypePad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/11/eaas-economy-as-a-service.html Mar-25-2011: Alternative currency attacked by the government Suresh Fernando wrote: > So you seem to agree that someone should own 'our nation' Hmm... Well, I see what you mean, we don't want pwnership - that's what we are trying to solve. But we need each a certain amount of control over a limited subset of the whole, else we won't even be allowed basic personal privacy. We must build a system that can both resist overaccumulation that modern feudalists seek, while retaining the ability to organize for more efficient production when sharing costs. Property ownership has some valuable attributes that, if handled carefully, can be used to our advantage as a species instead of being used as a tool of domination as it often has been by those who have organized before us. Similar to how the GNU GPL uses Copyright to create Copyleft for the purpose of protecting a non-governmental commons, We can write a Terms-of-Operation that we can then apply to Property Rights ... a sort of Property Left if you will, that will allow us to use regular ownership as the basis of a new approach to protecting physical assets that we might more efficiently hold in common. I think of it as a "simulated commons" that is constructed somewhat artificially - in that we do not wait for a government or corporation to finally do the "right thing", but instead make that action ourselves, in a collective manner. Part of the difficulty comes in discovering what 'rules' or 'laws' must be included in the Terms-of-Operation. I believe I have found 2 of those rules: 1.) Consumers are the investors who are the *real* co-owners of those Means of Production and the 'return' is the product itself which they *already own* as a side-effect of their owning the Sources of those products. This creates a truly use-value endeavor. 2.) Profit is treated as Payer Investment. This means late-comers pay Price above cost, but that overpayment is invested *for them* in even more Means of Production - so that each Users incrementally gains the property they need to protect them from paying profit in the future. It is a negative-feedback loop. Mar-25-2011: The growth of municipal broadband networks Suresh wrote: > Crowdsource Yes, and Crowd-Owned so Price and Cost are identical. This is better than City-Owned for at least two reasons: 1.) By avoiding the appearance of a government entity, corporations will not be able to claim you are skewing competition or generally attempting to be 'socialist' (with negative connotations). 2.) Government initiatives are not truly owned by the users, and so the users lose fine-grained control over what is allowed, and also pay Prices far above true Costs - with that extra revenue used by well-intentioned 'officials' to fund other pet projects. Mar-25-2011: Reading parts of Usenix.org/events/fast11/tech/full_papers Mar-24-2011: Alternative currency attacked by the government > The Fed creates money and then gives it > to banks, corporations and governments This is not quite what I understand. The system is so complicated that I am not sure whether the following is perfectly correct... I believe the structure is more like: The Fed is a sort of 'front' for bankers from all around the world (sometimes called "International Bankers"). These International Bankers issue the currency used by almost every nation. In the United States, these are "Federal Reserve Notes". These bankers then *BUY* whatever they want with this phoney money. One of the most terrifying commodities they buy is BONDS. The reason this is such a problem is that many of those BONDS are backed by land such as National Forests and other Federal properties. Because of this, we are losing ownership of our nations to shysters who *BUY* it from us using money they created without taking any risk whatever. Mar-19-2011: Open Source Microfactory Marcin at http://OpenFarmTech.org/weblog/2011/03/open-source-micro-factory wrote: > Imagine if you could build cars, industrial robots, > engines, and other things in your own back yard. If everyone can access the Means of Production, how will we keep wages above a bare minimum? Mar-19-2011: As Barriers to Entry are Lowered, Wages will be Destroyed As the overhead to participate is reduced, the number of potential workers is increased. As capital-outlay approaches zero, all peers will have the chance to reverse-bid for any job for which they have skills. This will cause wages to fall to the minimum since there will then be nothing to stop consumers from hiring the lowest bidder. Is this an expected result? What can we do to solve this dilemma? Mar-18-2011: Worker Ownership, Scale of Production and Use Value Joe Rinehart wrote: > you are mistaking the "product of labor" > for the "means of production." Yes, I see what you mean. I've made some mistakes here, and I'll be more careful. But there are examples that show the point, and I think the Olive tree still holds. > the worker who picks the olives should > certainly own some/many of the olives. We could pay them with part of the "Product of Labor" if that is what they want. But that is a separate question from whether they need ownership in the Means of Production. I am asking if the worker should gain ownership in a tree when he works on it, even when that tree is co-owned by a few neighbors that will be using the product without selling any of it. > theories would say that an individual should > not own 100 olive trees. Just to be clear: I am not suggesting a single individual should own 100 olive trees. I am talking about co-ownership of 100 olive trees, with the amount of owners determined by how much product they predict they will actually use for themselves. 100 trees might be owned by 150 people, for example, if those people don't eat much of that kind of product, or 100 trees might be owned by only 75 people when those users intend to use alot of that kind of product. The idea is to help users to gain exactly as much of the Means of Production required to produce the amount of product they intend to consume within the next round-of-production. Actually, I think it would be even better to help them co-own just slightly more than they predict they will need, so variance in output will not leave them in the position where they will need to buy the product from somewhere else - thereby suffering the payment of profit. In cases where the output is more than that owner can use directly, they should be able to do whatever they want with that extra product, even including *selling* it to users who do not yet have enough ownership. > It is a fallacy to suggest that something > that works on a small scale (private > ownership of capital for personal use) will > work on a large scale. Maybe it is a fallacy to suggest the opposite. Some things can scale, while others can't. Making the solution scalable is fundamental to it being a real alternative. Capitalism scales to some degree, but then begins to deteriorate quickly because of the concentration of wealth caused by treating profit as a reward for the current owners. Treating profit as an investment from the payer will allows the organization to grow while auto-distributing ownership to the agents who paid for it. Mar-15-2011: Worker Ownership, Scale of Production and Use Value Kevin Carson wrote: > All the situations you describe involve self-employed artisans > of one kind or another doing one-off jobs for customers, and > using their own tools to perform the service. Hmm... I see. But I think this oversight on my part does not invalidate the question in general. For example, what if I owned the tools to perform the service, but hired someone to do the work? Let's say I own the cable-splicer and whatever else equipment a network technician would need, and he used that equipment to network my house. Should he then become part owner of those tools? What if I owned all the wrenches and other things needed to fix my car, or install plumbing but hired someone else to do the work? Should he then become part owner of those tools? If he owned his own tools (the same as the ones I was offering), notice he would not be able to stop other potential Workers for reverse-bidding for that job - even when those other workers did not own tools themselves, because I would allow those non- owning worker to access my tools "at cost". His ownership would not help him except in cases where he was vying for a job from a customer that did NOT own those tools. I would be 'protected' through my ownership in the Means of Production from being forced to pay more than lowest wage any worker would offer. This seems to indicate that competition between workers is maximized when consumers own the Means of Production. This minimizes Wages and causes Profit to be undefined. Mar-15-2011: Worker Ownership, Scale of Production and Use Value Worker Ownership is a very widely accepted as being the obvious answer to wage slavery. It is said that Workers must have at least *some* Ownership in the Means of Production lest they otherwise be exploited by those owners. But when the situation is on a very small scale, the idea seems to break-down and become almost absurd - for would you have a network technician become part owner of your home network because you hire him to install some wires and configure your router? Let's try "stepping through" the logic of this - the way a programmer might "step through" a program as he is trying to debug what, *exactly* is wrong, and so what *exactly* must change. We will do this by reducing the scale to just one owner, and then slowly increasing the scale... Imagine you own a single Olive tree. You pick the fruit yourself and turn some of them into oil - all for your own, personal use. You use all of the outputs of that tree and you do all of the work. One day you slip and hurt your back. You can no longer pick the Olives, but the work must be done. If you hire someone to work for you, should that worker have some ownership in your personal tree? If yes, then should the mechanic that fixes your car become also co-owner of that vehicle? What about a plumber that fixes your pipes? Should he become part owner of your home? What if you hire someone to fix your laptop? Should he become a stakeholder of that device? Why do these questions seem illogical? What if the Olive tree is co-owned by you and your neighbor? What if an orchard is co-owned by 10 people? What if by 100? And 1,000? 1,000,000? The same of the other questions. What if the car is co-owned by 2 people? 3 people? 4, 5, 6, 7, etc... What if the house has more than one owner? What if it is an apartment complex? What if the laptop is a massive datacenter? When does the answer to the question of "Should the worker have ownership in the Means of Production" switch from "Obviously NO" to "Obviously YES"? But maybe this is simply the wrong question. What am I missing here? Why should the end-user retain full ownership in some cases, and under what circumstances should the workers become shareholders? I suspect it has something to do with whether the owners are using the product directly as compared to them selling it to other agents. When the product is used directly, it seems we do not have a problem with the users retaining ownership of their trees, cars, houses, etc. But if those owners intend to *sell* some of the product, then I think we feel the workers then deserve part of the Profit that will likely be collected from those buyers. So when Production is Imputed - where the owners of the Means of Production use all of the outputs of that production and nothing is sold - it seems under that condition, that Workers do not need ownership ... since I guess it would do them no good anyway. When the owners do not sell the product, there is no Profit to divide-up. Also, when all user-owners have sufficient ownership in the Means of Production, the usual tactic of stopping other Workers from accessing those Means (to increase wages) cannot be achieved by Workers gaining ownership for themselves, for when the users have sufficient ownership, they can allow any worker to reverse-bid for that job. Mar-15-2011: Co-Owning the Physical Layer Isaac Wilder wrote: > Now we are speaking not of a means of production, but of a means of > reproduction. The economics of the electron are radically different > from those of the atom. What would you say is more expensive for the planet: 1.) Copying and storing a strawberry by allowing another plant to grow and then drying that product in the sun and storing the results in a cellar. 2.) Copying a byte of data using equipment that was created in factories that poisons the atmosphere - and all the physical sources, recursively, required to mine those things from the Earth and transport them into place and all of that activity as it is being constructed, transported, installed and continually operated, including all of the coal, petroleum and nuclear reactors needed to power that activity continually, and also the dangerous and sometimes lethal results of dealing with the discarded hardware which fills our water supplies and air with dangerous concentrations of a wide variety of chemicals. > Humanity constitutes the means of production when it comes to > intellectual capital, We are a small part of that equation. What about the computers and wires and electricity and space needed to *host* that intellectual capital? Why pretend the physical layer does not exist? What good will that do? > and there's no reason why it shouldn't set about > the distribution of its own product. Look at Wikipedia - a resource > that belongs to the whole of humanity. The physical sources required to *host* Wikipedia do not belong to the whole of humanity. > Now we are talking about > something besides olive trees or houses or whatever other physical > thing - we are talking about patterns, numbers, encodings, bits. Olive trees are also patterns (genetics) applied to minerals. The same can be said of houses. The are composed of plans applied to the physical materials needed to *host* that pattern. > We are talking about building a system that transmutes and replicates > this commodity at no marginal cost. BALONEY! There are massive environmental and even just simple monetary costs. If the costs are so marginal, then why don't we just replace ComCast, Facebook, Google, Amazon Web Services, etc. immediately? We can laugh at their massive warehouses of servers and expensive fiber and cable as we host and transmit all of that data at no marginal cost... In 2010 Wikipedia asked for $16 Million USD to cover operating expenses ( http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/11/14/2010-contribution ) > It is only natural that humanity should own such a system, > as it is the entity which generates knowledge. Unfortunately we do not own the Physical Layer, and so are at the whims of those who do. > So then, it should be owned by whoever is willing to have a hand in > its construction and maintenance, and the essential thing here is > getting each individual to assent to the construction of such a system. So the Workers should be the Owners? What about just a single cable between two neighbors? If I hire someone to install that medium, are you saying that Worker should own that wire? Mar-15-2011: Co-Owning the Physical Layer > the producers of value, the workers, should be > the primary 'owners', 'possesors' or beneficiaries > of that value This approach is a very heartfelt and widely accepted as being the obvious answer to wage slavery. But let's "step through" the logic of this by reducing the scale to just one owner, and then slowly increasing the size of the operation... Imagine you own a single Olive tree. You pick the fruit yourself and turn some of them into oil - all for your own, personal use. You use all of the outputs of that tree and you do all of the work. One day you slip and hurt your back. You can no longer pick the Olives, but the work must be done. If you hire someone to work for you, should that worker have some ownership in your personal tree? If yes, then should the mechanic that fixes your car become also co-owner of that vehicle? What about a plumber that fixes your pipes? Should he become part owner of your home? What if you hire someone to fix your laptop? Should he become a stakeholder of that device? Why do these questions seem illogical? What if the Olive tree is co-owned by you and your neighbor? What if an orchard is co-owned by 10 people? What if by 100? And 1,000? 1,000,000? The same of the other questions. What if the car is co-owned by 2 people? 3 people? 4, 5, 6, 7, etc... What if the house has more than one owner? What if it is an apartment complex? What if the laptop is a massive datacenter? When does the question of "Should the worker have ownership in the Means of Production" switch from "Obviously NO" to "Obviously YES"? Mar-14-2011: Co-Owning the Physical Layer Hi Michel, I write to you in private because I want to avoid "calling you out" on the list, but value your input on this important topic. Sepp seems to be saying the workers will be fine without the need for ownership beyond that of use. I wonder if you could respond to this? I know you are not alone; millions of people feel worker ownership is vital to protecting those agents from exploitation. But I think there is a chance the reasoning may not be very well thought-out. It is difficult to get people to talk about things when they think the answers are so 'obvious' that they need no consideration. Please try to tell us exactly why the workers would want ownership in the context of the scenario of a user-owned network. Whenever I become confused about how to reason through some part of the question, I find it useful to bring the scale of the organization down to smaller and smaller sizes - with the number of owners at '1' being the 'identity' value. In other words, if you hired someone to fix the network in your home, would you say that worker should receive part ownership in your network? Thanks for your time, Patrick Mar-14-2011: Co-Owning the Physical Layer Sepp Hasslberger wrote: > I do not think that outsiders (like a > technician who is not a user of the > particular network he maintains) should > be required to be owners. A clean > professional relationship would be just > fine. Mar-14-2011: Co-Owning the Physical Layer Sepp Hasslberger wrote: > The end result will be a user-owned and > user-maintained network I'm curious about this particular statement. Are you saying the only agents allowed to work on a network must be within that specific subnet? If not, and if groups are allowed to hire anyone to work on the equipment, then should we require those workers buy ownership in that subnet before beginning work to protect them from exploitation? Mar-12-2011: Co-Owning the Physical Layer Suresh Fernando wrote: > > what you are saying is that most exchanges > of goods and services are not sales The goods are not sold, AND they are not exchanged. This is easy to see for a single owner, and probably nobody will dispute the idea that the owner of an Avocado tree - even if he pays another to harvest that fruit, does not *buy* those Objects because he owns them already - as a side-effect of his owning the Sources (the tree, land and water rights). This Mode of Production applies to all industries. We, the people, can co-own the internet as clusters of peers who invest for the purpose of receiving that connectivity without paying more than cost. ---- Imagine you have several computers within your home that you want to have connected together. You are not connecting to anything outside of your house, but are just creating an internal network. You buy the wires and routers and maybe hire someone to install and configure that equipment. You must also pay any other costs such as the electricity and any sort of upkeep those Sources require to keep them operational. Obviously you do not send yourself a bill in the mail every month and then pay that bill back to yourself. This is so obvious it may be too boring to consider. But bear with me for a few more seconds, as it becomes very interesting as we scale this network to more and more users. ---- Now imagine you talk to your neighbor about your new internal network and you both decide it would be fun to run a wire between your houses to share files and be connected for other reasons. You both pitch-in to buy the wires and probably the neighbor pays for the router that will sit in his house. You must pay all of these initial costs, and continue to pay the costs of electricity (until you finally build or buy a photo-voltaic array...). Now, there is no reason for each of you to *buy* that connectivity from your collective self. You just pay the costs and that is it. ---- Now comes the part that for some reason is confusing to most people. Imagine your neighbor also connects to *his* neighbor and you to another, and those to more, until there are hundreds and then thousands and even possibly millions and billions of people connected. *That* intranet/internet would be owned buy the users of that service. They must pay all the real costs of being connected, but cannot pay Profit, since they are not buying that service from anyone - but own it already as a side- effect of their owning the Sources of those Objectives. > How, in the transition to this model are portions > in the Sources (of production I assume) allocated? Simply according to the % of ownership. Mar-10-2011: Imputed Production Michel Bauwens wrote: > profit maximising company legally obliged to favour its shareholders Hmm... What if we built a crowd-funded corporation where the only shareholders were the very consumers of that product? Their ROI for taking risk would be to avoid paying profit - since the owner of an Apple tree does not *buy* the Apples from himself, but owns those Objectives already, as a side-effect of his owning the Sources. There would no longer be "Vendor/Customer" relations to worry about since the Vendor and the Customer would be one and the same! I wonder what disadvantages such an alignment might cause... Suresh wrote: > This, in the purest sense, is what a co-op aims to be, is it not? In the model I propose, the product is not sold back to each investor-consumer-owner, but it is already their property according to the amount they invested - whether with money or with labor. The owner of a milk cow does not buy the milk from himself, but owns it already as a result of his owning the cow. A cooperative SELLS the product back to the consumer-owners - thereby collecting !profit! and coming under the scrutiny of government restrictions (for example it is illegal to sell raw milk in some part of the US). There are more differences, but I will cover those later if anyone has interest in this "Imputed Production" business model (I hope so, as it has fascinating implications, and DOES protect the worker - but from the side of consumption instead of from the side of production). ---- (*)In cases where an agent has invested more than he can use directly, he can sell that product to agents who do not yet have sufficient ownership, but under the strict condition (enforced by a Terms of Operation over that organization) that any profit collected during that sale be treated as an investment from that payer - so the organization can grow in size while avoiding the troubles of centralization and overaccumulation that plague nearly every other endeavor that even begins to succeed. On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 7:07 PM, Michel Bauwens wrote: > there are different kinds of coops, and Patrick's vision is 'consumers' > only, which in a way makes the producers in the coop 'owned' by the > consumers ... I find this problematic and prefer multiple stakeholder models There is no reason to worry about the workers - for that is who I am protecting, but am protecting their ability to consume instead of trying to prop-up wages and avoid automation. Wishing the machines would just stop (as John Henry) will become less and less of an option as the robots are coming to take the work away - and we can be *happy* about that if we are working on the right side of the equation! Furthermore, even without robots, wages and profit will approach zero as the Means of Production become cheaper, since there will be no way to stop willing workers from accessing those tools and thereby providing the solutions consumers seek. Michel Bauwens wrote: > I remain unconvinced of a consumers-only ownership modality, again, all > stakeholders should have a stake, all peers, not just consuming peers Workers can invest more than they are able to consume, but it won't do them any good when the consumers already have sufficient ownership needed to protect themselves from workers who try to stop other peers from doing that work by blocking access to the Sources of Production. Workers cannot protect wages through ownership if other consumers already have sufficient ownership because propping wages requires the worker be able to STOP other potential workers from accessing the Sources of Production, and why would a group stop a peer from bidding to do a job - in some cases even for free (gratis). Like I said, I don't care if Workers invest and co-own more of the Apple orchard than they are able to consume, but how will that help them prop up wages when the other co-owners will always have the option to do the work for themselves or to hire the lowest bidder? When the consumers around those workers have sufficient ownership, they will not be buying the product from anyone, but will own it already as a side-effect of their owning the Sources of those Objectives. > if this type of consumer coop This is absolutely NOT a Consumer Cooperative. 1,) Consumer Cooperatives *sell* the product back to the co-owners and collect a profit during that transaction that a committee then doles out in a Tyranny of the Majority fashion. 1a.) Imputed Production only sells product to non-owners, and only when there is surplus, and treats that profit as an investment from that payer - causing ownership and control to be automatically distributed at the point of sale back to the actor who was willing to pay for it. This system minimizes and nearly eliminates the trading of goods since the owner of Sources does not buy the Objective, but owns it already as a result of his owning the Sources. The trading of goods will tend toward zero but does not reach stasis because of newcomers into the system (even just babies being born), and because people's interests change across time. 2.) Consumer Cooperatives are "Democratically Controlled" with one-member/one-vote. 2a.) Imputed Production is far more autarchic- where any member can 'fork' his portion of the Sources and secede from the union or sell those shares if a split is attempted that is finer than reasonable divisibility (you can't both feed a single milk-cow grain and NOT feed that cow grain, but can divide a herd). 2b.) Each member has exactly as much vote power as he has ownership. If you own 11% of a roto-tiller and your neighbor owns 22%, then you have only half as much vote power in decisions such as "how often should we change the oil". 3.) Every Consumer Cooperative I know of is only concerned with buying products that were made by Capitalists. 3a.) Imputed Production is primarily about ownership and control of the entire tree of production - recursively, and works toward a Vertically Integrated Commons where we, the people, own the farms and factories and land and water rights and all the other Sources and supporting Sources required to reproduce those things. There are other differences I don't remember right now, but please do not call my proposal a Consumer Cooperative, because the organizational forms are vastly different both in structure and in results. > turns out to be successfull, more people would > choose it (of course, this can only happen in a truly free society, so this > is quite hypothetical, and political transformations will be needed before > such type of free experimentation can occur) We don't need to transform politicians, and do not have enough money to buy such changes anyway. All we need to do is start businesses that are funded and owned by Consumers and that treat Profit as payer investment. Aaron Huslage wrote: > I would love to understand this more fully but it may not be germane to the > topic of this list. Do you have links to more info or could you provide more > detail off-list? This very much applies to this list if we intend to collectively own and control part of the physical layer. We, the users, can invest to co-own wires, cables, satellites, etc. needed to provide internet connectivity. We *ALREADY* pay for all the costs of those material Means of Production. And we *ALSO* pay profit (price above cost). So it is trivial to see that we could collectively afford to do so, for we already pay for everything anyway, but simply do it a bit late, and without being organized for our own purposes. Some of my thought on this are at http://P2PFoundation.net/User_Owned - though I need some help polishing those ideas. Mar-03-2011: I just noticed: http://AnDevUni.org '' The Android Developers Union We, the members and supporters of the Android Developers Union, are fed up with the conditions of the Android Market. We are tired of being treated like sharecroppers on Google's digital plantation! We have compiled a list of seven demands which Google can implement to improve the Market. Implementing these demands will absolutely improve the working conditions for Android developers, thereby improving the Android ecosystem and giving a better experience to our customers. '' Notice their approach is the same as traditional unions: To create artificial scarcity of some skill. This approach is destined to fail as the Means of Production continues to become cheaper. Wages and Profits approach zero as Barriers to Entry are reduced. This applies also to the "3D Printing" and "Tabletop Manufacturing" phenomenon - since, when *anyone* can manufacture some thing, there is no longer any way to prop Wages, and the difference between Price and Cost will be meaningless (Profit is undefined when Consumers own the Means of Production). The only viable approach I can see is to begin protecting the "other side of the equation" -> meaning, we must protect the Worker's ability to Consume by helping them organize to have ownership in the Means of Production from which they need the Outputs instead of trying to own the Means of Production for which they happen to have skills in operating. So, instead of Workers trying to own the factory where they work, they instead direct-invest* in things like Milk Dairies, Chicken Farms, Avocado Orchards, etc. because those are the Sources of the things they actually need, and let the potential Consumers of what they produce own that factory. (*) By 'direct-invest' I mean the Consumers would invest to co-own the Fields, Farms etc. and be 'paid' (their ROI) in Product instead of Profit - for the Product would never be sold since it would already be the property of those who intend to actually use it. Mar-02-2011: On Wed, Mar 2, 2011 at 5:43 PM, Dante-Gabryell Monson wrote: > Hi Patrick > we can set up cooperatives :) If they are very carefully defined, then we might be able to simply call them 'Cooperatives'. But most Cooperatives I know of *sell* the product back to the collective Owners and therefore collect Profit from them! This causes control to concentrate into the hands of a few - usually a "democratically elected" committee and causes many other subtle problems. What I describe is a "short circuit" across the typical market. Where the consumers do not buy the finished goods, but own them already - even before they are completed - as a side-effect of their ownership in the Physical Sources of those goods. If you own an Apple tree, you do not *buy* the apples from yourself. If you and your neighbor co-own an Apple, you need not *buy* the apples from your collective 'self'. If you 999 other people co-own an Apple orchard, you need not *buy* the apples from your collective 'self'. This has other benefits such as: 1.) Since the product is not sold, there is no chance for the government to collect sales tax. 2.) Since the product is not sold, there is no chance for the government to disallow that production (buying raw milk is illegal in many parts of the US). > or gather consumers for bulk buying, such as food banks. Those organizations are not OWNED by the Consumers, but are instead the property of some well-intentioned person or group that dominates all decisions. > do you have access to such forms of organization around you ? Nothing that is truly Consumer-Owned. > do you want to set one up ? Yes. I have saved up some money now, but have not yet begun because I cannot get a single human on Earth to actually consider the difference I describe - and so nobody understands how what I propose will be any different from what has already been attempted. Mar-02-2011: Dante-Gabryell Monson wrote: > "a free market is god damn expensive to the customers" > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9olxQqxyxaE&feature=player_detailpage#t=342s Mar-02-2011: [OK] Crowdfunding, open collaboration and positive social change... an invitation Mar-02-2011: Users: Who will be using it? And what for? Suresh Fernando wrote: > Why is there a funding gap for social innovators? Because traditional funding models attract investors who expect to be paid Profit. Profit is the difference between the Price a consumer pays for a finshed good or service, and the real Costs incurred during production. Isaac Wilder wrote: > Philosophically and practically, we should be designing a > system whose cost to each individual is the price of the > hardware and the cost of supplying power to that hardware. The customers *already* pay all the Costs of production. We, the consumers, foot the entire bill. And we *also* pay Profit because we choose to pay late. But if we could organize to pay early - to collectively purchase the Physical Sources of products and services we need - then, we would still need to pay all costs. But since we would own the objective as a side-effect of our owning the Sources, we would no be 'buying' from ourselves, and so COULD NOT pay Profit, for that final transaction would not even occur! Profit is UNDEFINED when the Customers are the Owners of the Means of Production. Why are we so disorganized and/or terrified of ownership that we leave it up to those that intend to subjugate and dominate us? And instead of taking a stance through property ownership, we beg and plead with the current owners to "please do the right thing" - even though the current owners have NO POSSIBLE CHANCE of "doing the right thing" for they owe investors who expect Price be kept above Cost. And Price can only be kept above Cost during Scarcity. So we see the drive for Scarcity is caused by choosing investors who expect Profit as a return. The drive for Scarcity can be eliminated by choosing investors who expect Product as a return. But only Customers can use Product as a return. So the answer is to attract Customers to pre-pay for Product - while using those pre-payments as actual investments which are then property co-owned by those Customers who benefit from the use-value of that production, and never need strive for Scarcity, for the product will usually never be sold. In the case where a Customer-Owner has too much product: the solution is to sell that product to non-owners, and even to charge Price above Cost (Profit) against those late comers *BUT* - here is the trick - the Profit received must be treated as though that Customer had just made an investment toward even more Physical Sources. Treating Profit as that payer's investment will allow the collective to include others while simultaneously avoiding the typical problems of overaccumulation and excessive concentration of control that cause even the most well-intentioned organizations to finally fail to meet the needs of those they were initially formed to serve (the customers of course!).