====THIS FILE IS ARCHIVAL. See 'Diary' for newest entries
Jan-31-2008: Reply to email from Max:
Subject: Why I am voting for Ron Paul
> Because I love God
But which God do you mean?
If you say "It doesn't matter" then why should anyone believe in ANY God when the claims each of these imaginary beings makes (through the scripture of each religion) conflict with the others in mutually exclusive ways?
For instance, the Jewish faith and Chrisitanity cannot be simultaneously correct since one says "Jesus is NOT the Christ", while the other says "HE IS".
Religion is a bacteria that you must purge from your brain in order to more clearly understand why corporations puppeteer politicians toward goals that are generally bad for the populace.
If you say "Well, I mean Jesus Christ of course", then maybe you should watch all of the http://ZeitgeistMovie.com of which you sent clips of the other day [ entire film available at http://Video.Google.com/videoplay?docid=5547481422995115331 ]
> , and freedom.
You may love freedom, but "Terrorists hate freedom"(TM) - where the terrorists are the corporations (think of these as the many-headed 'Beast' in Revelations if you like) who's PROFITS would fail (price would meet cost) if citizens/consumers were to be the OWNERS of the Means of Production (the factories and farms).
Marx and his follwers was/are wrong. It is the Consumers, NOT the Workers who must be the OWNERS. If you are thinking "Blah, blah, who cares about the details of economics?", then it is partially because you have not looked at this long enough, and also partially because you are falling into the trap set by these feudalists to confuse your brain with devisive religions.
> I took an oath to defend America against all enemies foreign and domestic.
> I believe the domestic enemies are far more dangerous than the foreign
> ones.
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo5CZvD3-QM
>
This film dusts the surface.
Could you please tell me (while avoiding the intellecutal laziness of labeling somebody 'evil') why corporations operate in this manner?
Why is [so-called Free] TRADE so important? It is mentioned many times in the film.
Why can't the people of this nation grow their own pine nuts and mandrin oranges? Why does China produce almost *everything* we consume?
Production is a military stance that we have been fooled into moving away from, but how did this happen?
What is profit? Do you realize the For-Profit corporations that run almost every government fail BY DEFINITION when Consumer Price meets Owner Cost? Poverty is prerequisite to Profit.
We (the taxpayers) pay so-called farmers (often celebrities and sport stars who have ag investments) to NOT grow within our borders. We pay for that land to sit idle so Price doesn't fall to Cost - for to do so would put all farmers (and any business) "out of business" because of the faulty notion that profit is a reward to be won against the rest of humanity!
Are we insane? But what is the answer? I have the answer, but you will not hear me when I tell you "Profit must be treated as an investment from the consumer who paid it so that price approaches cost and profit approaches zero in a safe manner."
I think Ron Paul has good intentions, and will likely vote for him, but even if he isn't removed by those who removed JFK and brought down WTC 1,2 and 7, he won't be able to solve the problem of TRADE unless the root problem of Usury (the mistreatment of profit) is recognized and acted upon.
See also: http://SPP.gov "Security and Prosperity Partnership Of North America"
Patrick Anderson,
President, Personal Sovereignty Foundation
http://EcoComics.org
Jan-30-2008: BlenderUnderground.com instructional videos for Blender.org
ElectricSheep.org >>Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver run by thousands of people all over the world. It can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers "sleep", the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "sheep". The result is a collective "android dream", an homage to Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
Jan-29-2008: Beginning to help with P2PFoundation.net/Peer_Trust_Network_Project
Jan-29-2008: Responding to "Material peer production (Part 1: Effort Sharing)" from list-en@Oekonux.org
Hello Christian and everyone.
> Christian Siefkes wrote:
> The first characteristic of peer production is that the effort required to
> reach the goals of a project is shared among those who care enough to
> contribute.
Would you say this set of people you describe also happens to be the same set traditionally called 'consumers' or 'users' of the product?
I understand you want all of these consumers to simultaneously be workers in that exact industry (operating the physical sources required for that exact production), but is there any case where they would not be consumers of the product?
If some of these people are ever not consumers (users) of those products, then why would those people ever choose to work?
If all of these people are consumers (users), then what you are describing happens to be a "User Owned" organization; though your requirement that every consumer also be a worker in that exact industry also makes it "Worker Owned"...
> Everybody who wants to benefit from the project (to get a bike) might thus be
> expected to _contribute some effort_ to the project
So you want every consumer to be a worker in that exact industry. I'm not trying to be a thorn, but I just don't understand why we would want to stop these consumers from using a currency to trade labor.
> will end up with a lower labor weight (say, 0.5), while an unpopular task
> (say, garbage removal) will end up with a high labor weight (say, 2.0).
Yes, what you say makes sense, but wouldn't it work just as well if each of these users owned percentages in each industry (such as garbage collection and recycling) in just the amount that they need for that product, so they were mostly not trading *goods* (since the owner of an apple tree owns the apples even before they are produced, even if he happened to hire some (paying a wage as a cost of production) to pick them), but were also allowed to trade *labor* by paying each other with tokens - so as to avoid needing to switch jobs and travel so much etc.?
> All who want just a single bicycle contribute roughly the same
> effort (as in the flat rate model), but those who want _two_ bicycles now
> have to contribute twice as much, and so on.
So the consumer "price" is twice as high for 2 bikes. That sounds fine, but is this (one part of your whole system) any different from what we see today?
I understand the Debt-Based currency we use today (such as the Federal Reserve Note) has terrible problems, but wouldn't it be ok if we made an 'internal', local currency or credit/point system to ease the trading of *labor*?
> If there is more demand for a product than
> can be satisfied, the peer project can thus "auction" the product: it can
> raise the relative _cost_ (the amount of required contributions) of the
> product until sufficiently many of the prospective users get second
> thoughts. I call this the _preference weighting_ model since the
> preferences of people regarding the goods they want to get are "weighted"
> (similar to the "weighting" of different tasks in the _weighted labor_
> model discussed above).
This also sounds the same as letting the 'market' take care of _this portion_ of the system.
> in a different way--those who get an auctioned good will have to contribute
> more, while those who want other goods (which can be produced in sufficient
> quantity) will all have to contribute less.
And that is also what we see today using the market and regular money, right?
> It is important to understand that no _exchange_ takes place between those
> who produce a good and those who use it: increasing the _cost_ (expected
> contributions) of a good won't increase it's _production effort_, and it is
> the production effort which the producers get recognized as contributions.
> If there was exchange, a higher cost for the consumers would go (wholly or
> in part) to the producers, but this is not the case.
>
This is a very important point, but it is from the fact that the Owners are also the Consumers that exchange of *goods* need not take place(1).
Allowing the exchange of *labor* is not something we need to avoid as long as the Consumers are the owners of the means of production (User Owned).
(1) We could still allow the exchange of goods, and this would be important for newcomers (johnny come latelys), but in order to hold the system in place we would just need to treat any profit (price above cost) as an investment from the consumer (user) that paid it to help them buildup their own percentage of ownership in each industry of that community.
Hoping we can work together to figure this out,
Your fellow GPL-Society engineer,
Patrick Anderson
President, Personal Sovereignty Foundation
http://EcoComics.org
Jan-27-2008: magius to list-en@Oekonux.org writes >>N55.dk is a platform for persons who wants to work together, share places to live, economy, and means of production.
Jan-25-2008: OpenP2PDesign.org
Jan-24-2008: Posted to list-en@Oekonux.org
On Jan 24, 2008 6:49 AM, Michael Bauwens <...> wrote:
> Hi Patrick
>
> I accidentally deleted your contribution, so I'm starting a new thread.
Michel,
1. Do you moderate, and have administrative rights over list-en@Oekonux.org? I'm very surprised, only because I always thought Stefan or Stefan did that...
2. You apparently read the text but deleted it anyway, and couldn't recover it? Your email software should be a bit more forgiving. Maybe you are trying to give me a hint about something I did wrong? If I made a social or technical error, could you please tell me explicitly, as I am extremely dense when it comes to non-literal communication, and am at a loss as to what I should do differently in the future.
3. Maybe it was best that text was lost anyway, as most of what I write incites an unfortunate mixture of boredom and anger. Rather that 'sharp' and 'pointed', I tend to be interpreted as both 'dull' and 'blunt' ;)
>
> What you write is of course true, and it is a very important reminder about the
> material basis of everything we do.
>
> Nevertheless, if people like Yochai Benkler,Mark Cooper, and even myself, write
> about non-rival or anti-rival resources, we are not denying these truths.
Ok, sorry, that is probably already clear to everyone but me.
>
> Simply that in a particular context, the specific polarity of a good induces very
> important logical and physical qualities, which require differential treatment.
This word "polarity" sounds very interesting. What do you mean by it?
> Of course, occasional, we or some others may go astray, forgetting that physical
> basis, but in fact we know it.
>
> That both the song and bread have a physical basis is one thing, nevertheless,
> because of the marginal cost of reproducing a song over an already existing and
> available network, it still makes more sense to share, rather than sell it, so different
> solutions must be found to fund that 'general infrastructure'.
By "general infrastructure" are you including creation, distribution and maintenance of the work? These are very different things, and I would like to talk about them separately, but it would help me avoid being redundant or picking nits if I could understand what is already obvious or generally understood by you and others.
I am very interested in what it will take to earn a wage from Free Software for instance, and my general view is that developers must somehow get connected to the consumers (users) who are willing to commit to paying for features *before* the work is performed.
I envision this as bug/feature tracking software that helps users easily add even a tiny "promise to pay" to cumulative bounties from within the application itself - as a kind of "complaint click" or "bitch button" that might even be integrated into the application 'frame' next to the [minimize] button...
On the developer side, any worker could sort their view of the bounty list by reward size (for instance), and probably choose to work on things they might have already wanted, but this also allows consumers to drive innovation without possessing the skills themselves by contracting to reward artisans for accomplishing work that may otherwise never have incentive to accomplish. If the work conflicts with the goals of the worker, the new version can be considered a fork and even be renamed if those consumers desire, or if the trademark holders demand.
It will probably usually be best to define that fork as a "patch" against the main project (think of the Linux kernel for instance) - so that special version will always easily receive other general improvements to the mainline without much fuss...
For other art, the artists should also plan to get paid *before* the performance by selling tickets to limited seating during the recording or filming, but this will require the consumers own the physical sources (land, studio, cameras, costumes, etc.) to make it efficient - otherwise the externality called profit will leak most of the value away from the community.
>
> What you say doesn't change that, or does it?
I think you are correct, and I was probably only reading to literally, but I won't be sure until you answer some of the questions above.
Jan-23-2008: Possible title for thesis: "Object Oriented Production -- The Goals of Political Economy"
Jan-23-2008: Posted to list-en@Oekonux.org
Subject: Rival vs. Anti-Rival, or Type vs. Instance
On Jan 23, 2008 1:30 AM, Michael Bauwens <...> wrote:
> I guess it would be most useful to hold a view of a polarity between
> totally rival goods and totally anti-rival goods.
Hello Michel and all,
This is my second post to the Oekonux list; the first was during the last part of 2003.
I would like to discuss what appears to be an almost universal confusion about the nature of reality itself that causes us to think rivalry (finiteness) is limited to certain *TYPES* of things (such as a loaf of bread or a washing machine), while we simultaneously mistakenly believe other things (such as movies and software) have no rivalry whatsoever.
Whether software or bread, everything is infinite (non-rivalrous) in potential, yet realistically constrained (rivalrous) in it's actualization.
A movie is obviously non-rivalrous in that the number of potential copies is infinite, but it is also constrained by the rivalrous space, time, mass and energy required to create, use, modify, copy and share it. It is common to brush off these hosting costs as being 'marginal', but if they are so unimportant, why don't we just start a video hosting site today to replace YouTube? Can we really pretend the warehouses of servers Google pays for are not physical constraints? And it doesn't end there. That movie cannot be utilized unless it is copied, which of course takes time, and consumes physical resources including the twisted-copper, fiber optics or satellite hardware (mass) to transmit it, and a local computer (more mass) and electricity (energy) and even land (space) to house these things.
Similarly, once the mechanical design of a washing machine (the type) has been created by an engineer, what are the potential number of washing machines (instances) that can be produced (how many times may it be copied)? The design is just as infinite in potential (non-rivalrous) as the movie, yet is also constrained by space, time, mass and energy again.
Wheat is actually just a design (DNA or genetics) that has been 'applied' to the Mass called 'dust' or 'clay' or 'sand', and the Mass called 'water' using a little bit of space (land) and some SUN for energy. The farmer and breadmaker apply their own designs as they harvest, thresh, grind, mix, knead, bake and cut to specialize that mass into a finished product.
But software also requires Mass for storage (a hard-drive, CD, DVD, RAM, even paper or your brain if you have not yet entered it into a computer) and a physical input device (such as a keyboard or microphone) for creation and an output device (such as a monitor or speakers) for "expression". This Mass also requires it's own Space to exist and of course software has little value if it can't be "expressed" by temporarily applying that design to a completed computer components using electricity for energy.
While the time and personal energy (labor) needed to copy a grain of wheat appears to be much more than downloading a copy of a program and running it, if we factor in all the resources required to manufacture the hardware and supply the electricity as compared to allowing nature to propagate the seed, it may not be as much of a difference as we imagine.
In summary, even though different TYPES of things require different AMOUNTS of physical resources for their production, the fact remains that all things have infinite potential, and all things are realistically constrained by space, time, mass and energy.
Patrick Anderson
President, Personal Sovereignty Foundation
http://EcoComics.org
Jan-21-2008: FOSSology.org >>FOSS: Free (as in Freedom) Open Source Software -ology: the study of
Jan-21-2008: Starting to follow OpenFarmTech.org and SocialSynergyWeb.org/opensourceecology
Jan-20-2008: Subscribed to list-en@oekonux.org described as >>a central mailing list of Project Oekonux. In this project people with different backgrounds investigate the question, whether the principles of the development of Gnu/Linux may serve as a foundation for a new economy. Derived from this is the question, whether the principles of Gnu/Linux may serve as a foundation of a new society.
Jan-15-2008: Posted to Blog.P2PFoundation.net/franz-nahrada-can-we-produce-for-physical-abundance-or-sufficiency/2008/01/14
Decreasing work through automation is dangerous except when the product consumers (whether of software or of bread or of cars) are the *owners* of the physical sources of production (the land and capital) required for that production.
"'Automation is the key to reduce the factor of labor drastically, to embed production in units of the right size to establish a circular exchange.'"
Fabbers may seem amazing, but they will not solve the problems we face. We have always had slow-motion, self-reproducing Fabbers that require only land (surface area), soil, water, sun and the rotting material of previous such Fabbers to produce the raw materials of food, cloth, soap, ointments, fuel and many building materials, yet so many on earth go without these necessities for other reasons.
One reason is that while collective ownership has great advantages over purely individual action, the organizations that are created for that complicated production tend to NOT distribute the ownership of the investments they make in more physical sources as that community grows. This causes democracy to become less and less direct.
It is good to treat profit as an investment in future production, but the ownership of that property should eventually come under the control of (should vest to) the very consumer who paid it. In other words, "price above cost" (profit) is a plea for growth, and must be respected as such for a system to scale.
Ownership of new investments is not currently distributed because to do so would hamper the (unfortunate) goal of Capitalist owners to keep consumer price above production costs in the name of *profit*, or (in the case of non-profit corps.), to retain ownership for the purpose of keeping the wage paid (say to the board-member of a non-profit hospital) artificially inflated - essentially absorbing what would otherwise have been labeled 'profit'.
If all employment within an organization were truly available for reverse-bid on the open market, then the 'overpaid' CEO would never be safe. This can happen when each user of the product is also a partial joint owner of the land and capital (physical sources) needed in predicted amount required for the production of that specific user's future demands (needs and wants).
All industry require material production already. Neither genetics nor software, nor mechanical design (such as of a car) can be utilized without space, time, mass and energy to *host* that information.
Videos from Google and spaces they call 'My' may *seem* free as in beer, but the arbitrary restrictions and requirements are already above the real costs.
Building washing machines (Second.Oekonux-Conference.org/documentation/texts/Seaman.html) is just as costly as social networking. The problem is not solved for products with infinite potential (software, genetics, mechanical design, music, video, etc.) because all of these require space, time, material and energy to use, modify, copy and share them.
Jan-14-2008: Listening to http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/audio/download/ITC.mySQL-EbenMoglen-2007.04.25.mp3 while reading http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail1897.html
Jan-13-2008: Promote progress, not profit.
Jan-12-2008: Writing a bit about gifts.
Jan-10-2008: Marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm
Jan-08-2008: swtch.com/lguest >>Lguest is a lightweight x86 virtual machine monitor for Linux developed and documented by Rusty Russell.
Jan-08-2008: Working on my .jwmrc and thinking about GNUnix it occured to me maybe the user interface (UI) should respect the Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) claims about which direction a person eyes tend to point while they are considering different kinds of information. Maybe the "complaint" button (for reporting bugs and requesting features) should be somewhere near the top so it will come into view as you roll your eyes in disgust.
Jan-07-2008: Samuel Rose writes this list of questions and quotes of my answers
Q: What is User ownership, exactly?
A: "User Owner" is an OpenBusinessModel that treats profit as incremental UserInvestment toward PhysicalSources so each consumer slowly gains Controlling Shares of real property ownership in that "For Product" business whenever they pay price above cost.
Q: Huh? "For Product"? "Price Above Cost"? What are those?
A: A "For Product" business is one in which the primary goal is Product. A "For Product" business can scale through a legally binding Social Contract that requires profit be treated as User Investment.
"Price Above Cost" is another way of talking about Profit, but also includes cases where wages are not fully competitive because the owners are acting as workers who overpay themselves.
In traditional Capitalism, a Consumer' payment of Price Above Cost is collected by the Owners of Physical Sources and labled 'Profit'. This difference between price and cost becomes the central goal, with the product becoming incidental and eventually even a problem for those owners if it solves or partially solves the problem (or 'need' or 'want') that business is predicated upon.
But a consumer's payment of price above cost is actually his plea for growth. He is admitting he can't meet that objective any other way because he doesn't own the Physical Sources needed for that production. It is important that he (the 'consumer' or 'user') be the owner of the physical sources even if he does not happen to have the skills to operate them. In that case, he can offer that employment on the open market for qualified artisans looking for work, and will pay those wages as a cost of production (just as he already does when paying for the object he desires), but cannot pay 'profit' unless he were to pay it to himself.
Q: Ok, so basically, when people buy products from this type of business, they become shareholders - real owners of a part of that company by paying more for the product than the product cost to produce, right? Each time they pay "price above cost" that extra amount is applied towards a share in the company for that consumer/user/customer, right?
A: Yes! Exactly!
Q: So, what is the advantage to doing things this way?
A: The advantage is extremely low consumer price. While production costs will actually be a bit higher at first since we won't yet have the efficiency of scale, as the consumers become the property owners of the physical sources of production, price approaches cost as profit approaches ZERO. Because of the dynamic nature of consumers, the perfect case is usually only achieved for brief periods of time, but in that case, price equals cost and profit equals ZERO when an Object User owns just enough of the Physical Sources required for the production of their demands.
Q: Won't this be difficult to govern? can average people be trusted to to own the Physical sources of production?
A:
Q: How will this affect our existing economies?
A:
Q: How does US, or other law currently apply to the User Owner
arrangement?
A:
Jan-06-2008:
RealSocial.org and Guaka.org >>Guaka! coding, free, intercultural, hitchhiking, open, transparent, traveling, trust, wiki
IMEL.org and wiki.IMEL.org >>Information Economy Meta Language
Prickly-Paradigm.com >>The old-time pamphlet is back, with some of the most challenging intellectual work being done today. Prickly Paradigm Press, LLC is devoted to giving serious authors free rein to say what's right and what's wrong about their disciplines and about the world, including what's never been said before. The result is intellectuals unbound, writing unconstrained and creative texts about meaningful matters.
Older entries: diary-dec-2007