I’m on the same page man. Keep me inna loop.
1 Like
Will do! It’s all part of the nonevil master plan!
Yeah, I think about, say, fifty different regions would be enough to satisfy anyone.
Great Idea, wonder if it could ever get implemented.
3 Likes
Just came by after epic twitter argument w/Abby Martin of RT’s ‘Breaking the Set’. They had a segment devoted to the Oxfam report and clearly did not understand what it actually said. For pointing this out Abby called me a ‘snide dick’ etc. The entirety of 'Breaking the Set’s math innumeracy is contained in this single tweet and the image therein:
[quote=“lolipop_jones, post:84, topic:20034”]
Yeah, I think about, say, fifty different regions would be enough to satisfy anyone.[/quote]
I’d say more than fifty! We’re not designed to care about several billion people, much less have to deal with them. Science says 150ish person groups is optimal for most of us and while there’s no reason one fork or another might not be extremely popular and collect a bunch of groups, why not open it up a bit?
Let them pick laws, economic system, governmental system, basic standards of civility, that sort of thing. The more variety you have the closer you are to an OKCupid/Configurator for your whole life, right?
After all, if our favorite people are one in a million, that’s seven thousand for each of us, separated based on where we were born. Make it a quest!
In a nation? Eventually maybe, but far easier to use a Mondragon-style corporation that people can live inside, right? Probably means eventually setting up a lot of groups outside the US since there are better legal situations and not all productive dreams are compatible with our policies, but hey, dirt is just dirt when you’ve finally got some options.
You just have to make it easy to move from place to place.
Which government defines the body of laws controlling ease of movement? Who gets to propose and vote on amendments to it? Are there restrictions on how much it can be amended? Who comes up with those restrictions, and can they be changed if they don’t seem to be working?
Maybe a different question has an answer in it?
[Made up by me]
Which methods of governance, resource management, economic system, and so on should be used first for top level interactions between different groups.
Because that’s how it should be, right, you set a reasonable bar for social interaction for the whole group . . . stuff a child could easily be raised to understand and most of us could learn if we could manipulate our own environment to make it easier to be a good and productive person.
Since this is important, you leverage the ‘nobody wants to get fired’ bonus and the ‘most other jobs really suck’ bonus, so you can ask people to raise the bar quite a bit.
Besides, getting to break away from this mess and take over your own life inside an entity that can protect you has an appeal, doesn’t it? It’s not the sort of thing that would be a hard sell once it got going.
Then as groups fork off they can start expanding the collective umbrella of agreed upon preferences, so one would presume zones in which those who make decisions be transparent and sincere about their decision making processes would be more popular than zones in which politicians get to lie, cheat, and steal.
Similarly zones in which people are well taken care of and everybody gets to be part of their community would be more popular where it’s okay for people to abuse you because it goes both ways . . and so on and so on.
Using whatever initial consensus system is in place the groups can vote to promote a different system to the top tier. and that top tier only influences a very small number of decisions because processes are more localized.
So basically as the laws/governments/lives/dreams/purposes branch out and more options present themselves people can choose for themselves what they like and we can start actually unlocking some potential.
At least that’s one possible way to go, right? Crowdsourcing a the most positive and peaceful revolution imaginable and turning our most maligned creation (the Corporation) into our most powerful force for good? That’s got a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?
Certainly a different question will be easier to answer! The favourite trick of any career politician. You’ll be president of the planet in no time.
Suppose a large territory is divided up into your “zones”, all united by a relaxed pan-zonal rulebook that basically allows them to pass their own laws, as long as they let people move around freely.
Over time a pattern emerges: eleven zones think that it is okay to buy and sell short people. The other zones don’t agree: doesn’t the rule book say that people are supposed to be able to move freely between zones? But on the other hand, if you’re short in a tall zone, you’re not legally a person, so it seems that rule doesn’t apply.
But hey, each zone minds its own business, right? People are free to move to another zone if they don’t like the situation. (NB. Obviously that doesn’t include “short property”; they’re property. They’re not people.)
Therefore all the people (as legally defined) are happy. Certainly the people (as legally defined) in the short-property zones are very pleased with their system and would be prepared to lay down their lives (let alone their votes) to defend it. Congratulations! Your idea works perfectly.
Well, not quite, because occasionally a short person will run away into a zone that recognises them as a person. Is it/he/she person now? Or does the owner still have property rights? Each zone has to figure out how to deal with such issues.
Eventually public opinion in the non-heightist zones becomes so outraged by the first hand accounts of escaped short folks that they start campaigning for a change to the pan-zonal rulebook to invalidate laws turning people into property. This doesn’t go down well in the short-owning zones of course. The people (as legally defined) there are not happy.
Then one day, some bright spark who owns a ton of short people gets an idea: “Why don’t we just fork the inter-zonal rulebook”? And so now you have two sets of zones with different rulebooks. And so on. Until war breaks out.
NB. I’m not making this shit up. Crack open a history book about the USA any time you want some practical guidance on the difficulties of defining a constitution.
“Crowdsourcing a the most positive and peaceful revolution imaginable and turning our most maligned creation (the Corporation) into our most powerful force for good? That’s got a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?”
Buzzwording the most buzzword and buzzword buzzword? Yeah! It sounds amazing! Where do I sign?! 
[quote=“Rickenhacker, post:89, topic:20034”]
Over time a pattern emerges: eleven zones think that it is okay to buy and sell short people[/quote]
See, everybody goes somewhere like there right off. There are lots of solutions there, but I think the best one was in the post you replied to (just a bit subtle)
I wasn’t going to be overspecific, but since you’re talking about a corporation and not a nation you’re able to start by picking and choosing people to an extent.
Incorporating a requirement that each human be treated as completely equal and respected as such would leave one with a large percentage of the remaining population while only excluding those who aren’t willing to put forth a bit of effort. The same is true for treating people with respect and a number of other easily identifiable traits. Let’s add that, with the exception of emergency management, nobody has any power over anybody else that’s not given consensually, either as part of the agreement that’s inherent in joining one of the groups or directly by the individual.
So, the only way a short person can be bought is if they themselves are choosing to be purchased, and they can end that agreement at any moment.
There are more solutions than problems here, you’re clever to think a bit ahead. . .but that was actually kind of a softball.
I can provide more solutions if needed, a lot of people could, but I bet you REALLY didn’t need me and could’ve come up with that bit on your own, you’re just used to people having crazy ideas that weren’t terribly well thought through 
Still, feel free to toss concerns out there, I’d just think it was extra-awesome if you also threw in a couple of solutions since you’re obviously smart and I always get my best new bits from people starting out disagreeing.
Yes, having some of that helps too. You motivate people by making them part of something they believe in. There’s no reason not to use EVERY psychological tool at our disposal, right?
Solutions to a different problem though.
Yes, that makes it easy. It’s what corporations already do, after all.
Incorporating a requirement that each human be treated as completely equal and respected as such
Oh dear, now you’ve made it complicated again. How are they equal if “you” (who?) are able to pick and choose people?
Let’s add that, with the exception of emergency management, nobody has any power over anybody else that’s not given consensually
Ah, that good ol’ emergency management. Did you know that Argentina’s various governments have declared a state of emergency 52 times since 1854? And Egypt declared a “temporary” emergency state of martial law in 1939, and in the subsequent 75 years has only been out of that state for 9 years?
South Africa declared a “temporary” state of emergency in 1985, giving “police and the military sweeping powers… curfews controlling the movement of people… president could rule by decree without referring to the constitution or to parliament… a criminal offence to… oppose the government… Detention without trial… media was censored, thousands were arrested and many were interrogated and tortured.” It lasted until F.W. de Klerk took over and started dismantling Apartheid.
There’s no reason not to use EVERY psychological tool at our disposal, right?
It’s not often I encounter someone who believes in using torture (you did say EVERY).
See, now that’s just silly, you know quite well that’s not anything like what I was referring to, nor would it be an effective recruiting tool for an organization that is by nature unable to trap them.
As for the rest, let’s try something different, because you’re describing issues that are endemic to THIS system, one in which people are trapped by their situations, unable to move about freely, and in which people are not considered equal.
So, could you make something like that work for YOU? Could you live your life peacefully, just helping other people and doing awesome things? Are you capable of not creating these scenarios yourself?
Don’t say 'but these OTHER people are going to ruin everything . . they’re not in your monkeysphere. If you can’t get past one group or another then don’t worry about them. Either they won’t get hired, they’ll get fired or have no influence, or maybe. . . just maybe. . . people are heavily influenced by their environment and the world around them.
Can you be part of something like this without screwing with anybody else? Could you be a value add? If you had several billion people to choose from could you find a few you could hang around with and share causes with that don’t ruin the lives of others?
I bet you could.
I know no such thing, that’s the whole point!
How is it unable, “by nature”? What does that mean?
You’re describing my every-day life! I go out of my way to only add value to the company I work for, and if I don’t think the company is doing the right things I do whatever I can to change it for the better, or I leave it.
Really my point throughout is that you have been repeatedly describing approaches that already exist, and are widespread and very familiar to everyone. They’ve all been tried, and are being tried over and over, and they sometimes work, for some of us, and sometimes (for a lot of unfortunates) they don’t.
1 Like
I thought that was kind of inherent. If you have a corporation it has to exist somewhere, and the people within it start with a national citizenship. A person can always leave a corporation and return to their nation.
Ahh, it is true that many things discussed have been tried.
However, not in combination.
We have employee owned corporations that are very powerful and successful like Mondragon. We have corporations like Valve that have effective squad-based ‘choose your projects and management structure’ and are very dominant in a single vertical. We have eco-villages, cooperatives, and utopain communities that work quite well in the short term but have little ability to expand or grow.
We’ve got PIECES. . . but nothing like we’re talking about here. In fact there only the smallest fraction of humanity has any sort of whole-life option at all.
No, there’s nothing inherent or automatic about that at all. It only came about a few centuries ago, after millennia of most people living in a kind of slavery.
We’ve got PIECES. . . but nothing like we’re talking about here.
What are we talking about here?
Well, we started with our basic ‘we have some inherent flaws in the system’ conversation.
Then @Kimmo pointed out Clay Shirkey’s excellent talk on open-source law making, so we diverged into forking laws based on personal preference.
Then @NickyG pointed out the potential of non-geographically bound nation states, and I think that’s where we diverged slightly, because you pointed out issues with territorial monopolies (quite true) and I brought up the end-around (using a corporation, so you can have campuses distributed all over the world and use the existing mechanisms for land rentals and purchases to manage that issue)
So our mental constructs are most certainly different, and to be honest I’ve found it very difficult to describe things because we all tend to make so many different assumptions. I’ve recently tried to do a better job of it here and mentioned it earlier (and had one person lurking in this thread read who was quite impressed by, so it may actually be good, and I did add funny things for readability)
Of course, that’s completely getting scrapped now that I’ve found a similarly focused group to merge with with some new ideas, but it sets the stage I think. We’re just talking using a corporation and placing a virtual nation inside it, and then using actual evidence about what we actually do to incrementally improve things when it comes to operational efficiency while using a far better working environment to obtain money and resources hitting low-hanging fruit in the ‘real’ world, probably primarily hitting the private-public partnership.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
