Related: diary
Oct-30-2009: An Operating System should attempt to minimize overall resource usage by maximizing the effectiveness of physical source utilization per process. This is traditionally accomplished by carefully allocating and scheduling the Material Means of production on a per-process basis according to the preceived 'needs' of that process and to generally inhibit process 'starvation' by weighting allocation and scheduling decisions against current holdings.
Oct-30-2009: Another title idea: From EconoMe to EconoWe.
Oct-29-2009:
Is Profit the only reason for production?
What about the product itself? Doesn't anybody care about that?
What if the investors could be satisfied with receiving "at cost" product? Is that possible?
What if the investors were paid in product instead of needing to keep price above cost?
What if the investors were the very same humans intending to use the product?
Why are we so sure we must have a group of predatory investors that take value from production?
Clearly there is something wrong with our thinking about the economy.
But if we are confused about how the machine works, why are we so reluctant to reconsider some of our base assumptions?
Most would agree that Profit appears to be a problem once it is 'large' enough; but then why can we not reconsider the idea that there is no other reason for production than to keep price above cost?
We must protect the workers in the oil fields and refineries and the truckers, etc. by helping them to also become investors and owners in the physical sources of the products that *they* use as well.
If the consumers were the investors and therefore owners, there would also be no trouble with automating the work away, as it would only reduce costs.
We must each have ownership in the material means of production for the purpose of "at cost" product so we can receive the outputs we each need without the 'need' to be employed.
We will each need to trade our skills with others that have skills we do not have, but in those cases we will only be working toward the elimination of work instead of seeing it as a requirement for survival.
The owners of physical sources are also the owners of the *objects* of those sources, so work is simply a hurdle to be overcome, not a need in and of itself when the owners and consumers are one and the same.
If we can overcome our psychological conditioning that leads us down strange (scarcity is good) roads based on the faulty assumption that Profit is more important that Product, then we can solve nearly every issue that has been discussed lately here about the 'trouble' caused by automation and finally view it as an increase in leisure instead of being muddled in the illogic that causes us to believe destruction is good.
Oct-28-2009: Reading arXiv.org/abs/0908.4580 >>We propose to study market efficiency from a computational viewpoint. Borrowing from theoretical computer science, we define a market to be efficient with respect to resources S (e.g., time, memory) if no strategy using resources S can make a profit. (download at arXiv.org/pdf/0908.4580v1)
Oct-28-2009: Posted to Groups.Google.com/group/cloud-computing-use-cases
The use-case I am imagining is one that is not very common today, but can be shown (and I believe even proven) to be finally the most efficient for end users.
This is a scenario where a group of users are the full and only co-owners of a Cloud that is neither quite private and not quite proprietary.
The difference here is how the Cloud would be accessible as a "public resource" to any paying customer (I'm using the term 'customer' here as an "end user without sufficient ownership") but where any price above cost (all profit) is treated as an investment from that very same user.
Stated another way: A "User Owned" (tentative title) Cloud is fully owned by a group of end users for their own purpose of "at cost" access, yet:
1. Is different from a "Private" Cloud in that non-owning customers are allowed access.
2. Is different from "Proprietary" and from "Non-Profit" Clouds in that all profit is invested *for* the very customer who paid it and then 'vests' back to that same payer as **real ownership** in the new physical sources that were purchased (computer hardware, buildings, etc.) during that growth. This causes all new, non-owning customers to incrementally become co-owners themselves whenever they pay price above cost.
Oct-26-2009: Though both are attempts at covering the costs of production, traditional taxation and venture capital investment are fundamentally different. Taxes are like a forced system of prepayment but without even the benefit of anonymity.
Oct-26-2009: Posted to Vilfredo.org/viewquestion.php?q=64
Subject: Why does Capitalism fail for most participants?
It is common thinking to blame the failure of Capitalism on 'greed' exhibited by some of the actors.
But that is like blaming the failure of an Operating System kernel (such as FreeDOS, Linux) on processes that attempt to hoard all or most of the CPU, RAM, Network throughput, Video Memory, etc.
We can't blame the failure of the system on any individual participants because the entire purpose of the system is to withstand processes or humans exhibiting 'bad' behavior so we all have a chance to 'win'.
I am trying to ask why Capitalism fails to inhibit the actions that eventually cause the system to become unstable and finally 'collapse'.
What 'rules' would a corrected system require and what would it disallow?
What causes excessive accumulation (what is the real cause of Profit), and how would a corrected system handle that value?
Since Profit only occurs during scarcity, treating it as a reward for the current owners tends to incent the withholding and even destruction of real solutions. For example, the US Farm Bill once again pays farmers to NOT grow for the purpose of keeping Price above Cost. Arable land is held out of production to increase scarcity because scarcity is the basis of Profit.
But the original purpose of production is *product*, not *profit*. We don't seek scarcity in small groups - we seek abundance. A family doesn't work against itself, it works together.
So what "flips this over"? Why are the goals of Capitalism inverted from our original goals of community? When and why do we switch gears from Freedom to Power?
Oct-23-2009: Posted to ListCultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org
Paul D. Fernhout wrote:
> How about a new city in the USA designed for walkability?
Walkability is hindered by a property tax structure that punishes improvements instead of weighing against excessive holdings.
This creates a 'speculation' market for physical location where investors (or even innocent farmers that find themselves encroached-upon by the growth of a city) can hold large amounts of land *just as long* as they do not develop it.
This is why we see so many underdeveloped patches within cities. These unproductive lots add distance to our travel and so cause excessive transport of both goods and humans.
> the deeper issue is how we build our ideology into our physical infrastructure.
The P2P movement can create a physical infrastructure if we can formulate a realistic "cost recovery" mechanism so we can begin hosting the intiatives we seek.
This requirement applies to 'online' work such as a social networking site that needs physical computers and buildings and electricity and workers to install and manage them etc.
And applies equally to 'offline' work such as installing useful plants and mushrooms on 'public' grounds within our GNU city.
In either case we must discover a way to cover the expenses of operation.
Governments have traditionally taken the approach of "gather a bunch of money into a slush-fund, then dole-out funding to projects as some 'representative' council sees fit".
A much more direct, and in my opinion, "P2P" approach that avoids some of the "Tyranny of the Majority", allowing citizens to retain much more control would be:
1. Allow any citizen to 'advertise' any project proposal.
2. Other citizens that become interested may choose to fund those projects.
2a. Funding can be in the form of Money (Will add X$) or Labor (Will work to accomlish Y amount of some goal) or Physical assets (Will supply a roto-tiller during some window of time).
3. When any project receives enough funding, then it can begin implementation.
4. Citizens who helped fund the project are stakeholders in the same % that they invested.
5. Citizen do not fund projects they do not care about, so have much more control.
Oct-20-2009: Another example of why Sir Bill Gates should be considered a true terrorist and an enemy of all humanity: OpenDotDotDot.BlogSpot.com/2009/10/gates-gives-300-million-but-with-catch.html
Oct-15-2009: Comparing ideas for Co-Ownership with the current practice of "Fractional Ownership" for 'luxury' items such as small aircraft, vaction homes, yachts, etc. This remided me of "Owner Occupied" and led to my discovering "Tenancy In Common" and TIC Agreements that cover many of the issues that must finally be discussed and codified in the GNU General Public Law.
I also re-discovered Wikipedia.org/wiki/Concurrent_estate which is a great overview of how the difficulties of multiplexing physical property have been addressed.
These guidelines are useful for puzzling-through what we must do to complete our Free as in Freedom Trade Agreement, but the more I read about them, the more I think it would be better to avoid declaring such use to the containing state, since they will then be required to "take action" against us in the various ways that are setup to squash any effort toward freedom...
Points to consider:
* Percentage of ownership and Partitioning
* Use restrictions
* buy, sell, rent/lease
* price
* refusal
* fellow co-owners a chance
* Inheritance
* Property modification/improvements/repairs and costs
* Initial and recurring costs such as installation, management, maintenance, insurance, operation, consumables, security
* Voting rights and secession
* Cost-recovery vs. Taxation and the impact on rights of secession
* Granularity of Divisibility and impact on rights of secession
Oct-13-2009: Reading Oekonux.org/texts/GermFormTheory.html
Oct-13-2009: Community-Wealth.org >>Our goal is to provide you with the web's most comprehensive and up-to-date information resource on state-of-the-art strategies for democratic, community-based economic development.
Oct-13-2009: We must control the sources of the objects that we need.
Oct-13-2009: ControlTier.sf.net >>ControlTier aims to be a complete, enterprise-ready system for automating the deployment and management of multi-tier and distributed application services. Visit http://open.controltier.org or http://wiki.controltier.org for more info.
Oct-08-2009: NUt is a Network Utility for CIFS, SSH, HTTP, FTP, NFS, VNC, RDP
Oct-07-2009: Listening to http://go2.wordpress.com/?id=725X1342&site=lianza2009.wordpress.com&url=http%3A%2F%2Fpodcast.radionz.co.nz%2Fsat%2Fsat-20091003-0905-Richard_Stallman_digital_freedoms.ogg from http://lianza2009.wordpress.com/2009/10/05/richard-stallman-on-radio-new-zealand
Oct-06-2009: Attempting to visualize usury as the basis of capital accumulation.
Oct-02-2009: Posted to ListCultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org
Tomas Rawlings wrote:
> I was thinking how would a p2p book award work
Hi Tomas,
I would like to take advantage of such a setting for abstract observation and corrective feedback of the P2P community. We should always consider ourselves "on trial" by everyone wondering what P2P is about. Do we walk the walk, or just talk the talk?
I'm most interested in the "how would it work" part since this activity could (I think should) be seen as a microcosm of P2P itself.
I would want to apply and utilize P2P principles to this very process studying how we, as peers to peers, handle the complexities and difficulties of making 'correct' group decisions - and afterward critically analyze how we *should* have handled things.
Those (maybe just me) using this viewpoint would cause the apparent goal (of delivering an award) to become an arbitrary sort of vehicle used to observe whether supposed P2P adherents are willing to live by their own statutes, and to hopefully learn some things we don't understand about how to cooperate, govern, vote, reward, etc. so we can refine, expand and solidify the definition of the term 'P2P'.
Some examples of these meta-issues include:
* The process we use to decide what needs to be decided (currently set to "criteria, selection and judgement"). Maybe this has already been decided by you, our "benevolent dictator" (meant in the most respectful manner - only meaning you came up with the idea, and we must somehow begin), and maybe that is how P2P does and/or should work.
* The meaning and 'shape' of concepts such as judgement: for example, what will 'consensus' mean; is it possible for everyone to 'win'; etc..
* Legal issues such as Copyright: for example, what licenses would be allowed and disallowed, and how will this be determined.
* Meta-meta issues sucha as: what happens to a minority that 'looses' during a vote of any such point? Should they be allowed to 'fork' the activity to arrive at their own results? Do we care about the tyranny of the majority? etc.
* ...[many others]...
Sincerely,
Patrick Anderson
Personal Sovereignty Foundation
http://patware.FreeShell.org