Starting to design new PHP/MySQL feature in NewEco, requesting brainstorm help
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
Message-ID: <REM-2009...@Yahoo.Com>
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/fcb1f6252d45ae1c?hl=en&dmode=source
where I summarized my the core accounting features in
http://TinyURL.Com/Portl1 which is the portal to
http://TinyURL.Com/NewEco, and then I announced that I was ready to
start implementing the next core feature, the first that goes
beyond core accounting, namely surveys. The reason this is a "core"
feature of NewEco is that it will be used to guide bootstrapping,
by suggesting features that are popular enough to be worth
implementing, as opposed to the tens of ideas I have had myself
http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/WAP/projectIdeas.html
most of which nobody really would use if I implemented because
nobody wants or has any use for such features.
Here's a copy of what I said there about my NewEco surveys:
*** START QUOTE ***
So what surveys? I'll start off with two:
* What survey would you most like to invest in?
- Survey of what survey you'd like to invest in (i.e. this self);
- Survey of what NewEco features you'd like me to work on next;
- Fill in blank: ___________________________________________________
* What NewEco feature would you prefer that I implement next?
- FilJob = Filtering job ads to eliminate the ones you don't qualify for;
- TruFut = Truth-futures market, estimating truth of claims;
- Contract work: Post RequestForBids, lowest bidder does work and gets paid;
- PAlert = Priority-alert notification system;
- RevTre = Reverse tree for filtering mass-input to low-bandwidth destination
- Fill in blank: ___________________________________________________
(Suggestion: Look at TinyURL.Com/NewEco and
http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/WAP/projectIdeas.html
for ideas of online services I'm eager to implement if you show interest.)
;;Addenda: RevTre added just now, not in last night's posting.
My current idea for design is 3 tables:
- List of surveys
- List of items in surveys
- List of investments by users in items in surveys
*** END QUOTE ***
Now I'm starting to get into serious design of the three MySQL tables.
Here's what I have so-far:
Addenda 2009.Oct.30 17:
Table surveys:
- Auto-generated ID number, used to correlate with items in survey
- Short title, to fit on cellphone screen after counts
- Long title, to fit on VT100 screen after counts
Table suritems:
- Auto-generated ID number, used to correlate with user-investments
- Name of table containing survey to which this item is posted
- ID of the survey (within that table) to which this item is posted
- Short title, to fit on cellphone screen after counts
- One-line description, to fit on VT100 screen after counts
- Full description, to expand after link clicked
Table surinvest:
- Auto-generated ID number, for toplevel citations from PHP scripts & SOAP msgs
- ID number of user making this investment
- Name of table containing survey-item to which this investment is made
- ID within that table for the survey-item to which this investment is made
- Current investment (milliseconds of labor)
For reference, note that for the core accounting parts of
NewEco/Portl1 I am already using these tables:
Array ( [Tables_in_calrobert_db1] => accounts5 )
;Identifies each user account, and shows current milliseconds in account
Array ( [Tables_in_calrobert_db1] => connects )
;Log of all connections to the Portl1 application (not yet used)
Array ( [Tables_in_calrobert_db1] => const1 )
;System constants such as public keys for encrypted+signed SOAP messages
Array ( [Tables_in_calrobert_db1] => missing1 )
;List of missing-word "Turing" tests for proving you're not a spambot
Array ( [Tables_in_calrobert_db1] => sessions2 )
;All login sessions, showing userID, time started, NULL or time ended
Array ( [Tables_in_calrobert_db1] => turingip1 )
;Cross-reference for user currently working on a Turing question
The UserID in table accounts5 will be referenced in table surinvest.
Note that between a user's login and logout, while that user's
session is active hence the server knows which user is making each
service request, each script-run is timed, and rounded up to the
next integer millisecond, and the user's account balance is
decremented by that amount as the last step in the script-run.
Now back to brand-new design-brainstorming: First some use cases:
User has logged in, and has used Turing tests to accumulate enough
labor-time to qualify for investing in surveys. The main menu at
this point shows a menu item for surveys. The user clicks on that
menu item. The system now shows a gross count of surveys and
investments, then offers the user a view of the primary
mmeta-survey, the survey-of-surveys, either sorted per that user's
existing investments, or sorted per system-wide investments. Also
the user is offered a view of *only* new surveys the user hasn't
yet seen, chronologically by time of creation. Eventually when
there are a large number of surveys, a search would also be
available to use keywords to try to find surveys or topics of
surveys of interest regadless of investment.
Once the user has a list of surveys on-screen, the use will have an
option of going into any particular survey to see the items sorted
per that user's investment, or sorted per total investment, or just
the items the user hasn't yet seen sorted chronologically by
creation time.
Once the user has selected an item within a survey, the user may
change his/her investment, moving any desired number of
milliseconds from that user's main account into the investment
account for that survey-item, provided that the user's account
balance never drops below ten seconds (ten thousand milliseconds).
Or the user may move funds *out* of the survey item back into the
user's main account.
As an alternative to selecting one of the existing items to invest
in, the user may suggest a new item to be added to the same survey.
That item will be immediately visible to that one user, but won't
be available for other users to view until I personally look at it
to make sure it's a valid item for that survey and to censor it for
obscene or otherwise abusive or illegal language and possibly to
re-word it to make it more easily understandable. The user who
submitted it won't be able to invest in it until after I've
approved it as-is or re-written it and approved the re-write. No
other user will even be able to *see* it until it's approved.
From time to time in background (or whenever I feel like manually
copying the report) I'll copy the master list of surveys, sorted by
total investment (trimmed to just the ten or twenty most
invested-in), and copy the items in each survey, against sorted by
total investment (and again trimmed to just the most invested-in)
to a public-accessible Web site, to act as public information as
well as an advertisement for NewEco.
And yes of course, my own system account will be making investments
right along with regular users, in my case making small investments
to promote features I believe will be useful for bootstrapping the
system as well as all features I have a good idea how to implement.
But I won't be perverting the surveys by making major investments.
The surveys will reflect the desires of the many users, not
predominately my sysadmin desires.
From my *personal* account, however, I'll be investing just like
any other user, to promote my *own* benefit by use of the system
with the new features implemented.
Note that the major use I'll make of funds that go into the system
account will not be biassing surveys. Rather I'll be using those
funds to post RFBs (Requests For Bids) to pay people to work for
me, such as writing PHP/MySQL code. So why would anybody want to
work for me, and earn credit on my system, that can't be converted
to cash (at present anyway)? Maybe for the "good feel" of working
on a public-benefit system. But also since the funds earned can be
invested in surveys, my employees get to affect the public survey
results that will be published from time to time. And later when
other features are added t the system, the use can withdraw funds
from the surveys to spend them on something more valuable to that
user. (Yes, the surveys are somewhat like a bank account where you
can deposit and withdraw funds at any time, except instead of
getting interest on investment, your funds influence something so
long as they remain deposited. And since your investment in the
features-to-implement survey will influence what features I work on
most actively, you will get tangeable benefit from your investment,
the benefit of getting me to perform free software implementation
of your favorite features for NewEco.)
So why am I posting here? To solicit your help in finalizing the
design of tables and use cases before I start writing PHP code to
implement the design. I need "thinkers", even those who can't write
a line of code themselves, but who can proofread my design, think
about subtle long-term issues, think of the grand purpose of NewEco
and these new surveys, and suggest improvements in design. I also
need unemployed software programmers who have PHP and/or MySQL
experience or who would like on-the-job training to learn such
skills, to help write some of the actual code, so that I don't have
to write every line of code myself. I could also use people with
skills in the middle, to help with the top-down analysis of
software needed to implement the design, before it gets down to the
level of detail of functions that need to be coded.
Jerry Stuckle
<Lots of stuff snipped>
>
> So why am I posting here? To solicit your help in finalizing the
> design of tables and use cases before I start writing PHP code to
> implement the design. I need "thinkers", even those who can't write
> a line of code themselves, but who can proofread my design, think
> about subtle long-term issues, think of the grand purpose of NewEco
> and these new surveys, and suggest improvements in design. I also
> need unemployed software programmers who have PHP and/or MySQL
> experience or who would like on-the-job training to learn such
> skills, to help write some of the actual code, so that I don't have
> to write every line of code myself. I could also use people with
> skills in the middle, to help with the top-down analysis of
> software needed to implement the design, before it gets down to the
> level of detail of functions that need to be coded.
None of this has anything to do with PHP. And you're asking for people
to donate their time to your money-making project? If you want help, I
suggest you hire someone, just like the rest of us do.
--
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
jstu...@attglobal.net
==================
Gordon Burditt
You seem to have a strange definition of a "survey". Assuming
you're not talking about land surveys, I define a survey as a set
of questions asked of a bunch of people to determine opinion about
something.
People are overloaded with such surveys, to the point that there
are not enough hours in a day to answer them all, so you generally
have to bribe people, minimally with "a chance to win", or better
with cash, to get people to answer them. Many (most?) surveys are
sales pitches in disguise, and are often considered SPAM. A survey
is not something people "invest" in. The SEC might be very interested
in surveys that people are asked to invest in, even in imaginary
currencies. Other agencies might be more interested if the term
"invest" turned out to really mean "wager". State lotteries hate
competition.
You have one or more surveys, which each consist of one or more
questions, which often have two or more multiple-choice answers,
or sometimes free-form answers. A survey will have zero or more
user responses, which consist of the survey being answered, perhaps
user identification, and a set of answers (including a possible
no-answer answer) to the questions asked. You might have a varying
number of votes used on a survey (or on individual questions) if
users get to decide where to spend voting credits.
The above paragraph might have some clues as to the appropriate
table structure for surveys.
It is generally considered very bad form to have a database column
consisting of the name of a database table. Usually the solution
to this is to take all of the tables that might be named here, put
them in one big table, then add a column with the former "table
name" (or, for efficiency, use an integer ID instead of the name)
in it. The added "table name" column probably should be added as
the first component of any index (particularly unique indexes).
I find it strange that you are building in an incentive for the
system implementor to make the system slower and therefore earn
more currency back. Remember, script run time can be dominated
by database locks, which aren't the specific user's fault and
can greatly vary between separate accesses to the same script.
>My current idea for design is 3 tables:
>- List of surveys
>- List of items in surveys
>- List of investments by users in items in surveys
Assuming for the moment you have a Presidential Election Survey,
the List of surveys would have an item for "Presidential Election
Survey", an item (perhaps the only one) in a survey would be "Who
would you vote for if the Presidential Election were held today?",
and perhaps one user spent 3 quatloos in favor of the election,
which would show up in the investment table.
See something missing? Usually a user would select a candidate,
like Obama or McCain, or vote For or Against a proposition, and the
list of answers is often (but not always) associated with the
question. For this survey if done before the primaries, you'd
probably want a way to add (non-obscene) write-in candidates as the
political landscape changes. Palin's name wasn't mentioned at all
early in the campaign.
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> None of this has anything to do with PHP.
Most of this new system (and *all* the code so-far written) is PHP.
How does this not have anything to with PHP??
Are you asleep at the keyboard, just not thinking before you post?
> And you're asking for people to donate their time to your
> money-making project?
If you read the entire document at http://TinyURL.Com/NewEco, and
somehow you got the idea this was a money-making project, then my
writing skill must be far worse than atrocious, because you've
gotten a totally wrong idea of my plan. I would *really* appreciate
if you'd go back through that Web page and cite exactly where I
said something that gave you the mistaken idea that this will be a
money-making project. Once I see how what I wrote gave you a
mistaken impression, then I will know which text needs re-writing
to communicate better.
> If you want help, I suggest you hire someone, just like the rest
> of us do.
People who have lots of money already, either by family
inheritance or by good luck with business or lottery, can do
several things that nobody else can do:
- Start a new business by purchasing all equipment and
supplies and leasing property using cash, then sustain
employee pay and expenses from cash reserves until the
business starts turning a profit on a regular basis.
- Pay cash for purchases of products and services, either to
retail stores or mail-order companies, or directly to
contractors or casual employees (but the IRS has outlawed
the latter for any wage totalling one dollar or more per
job, so this has to be done "under the table" i.e. illegally).
- Hire a private servant such as valet or secretary.
- Invest in markets, such as stock shares, commodity futures, rare metals.
- Loan money to others wishing to start small businesses, in
return for promise of payback with interest.
I'm not one of those fortunate people who is wealthy enough to hire
people. Are you one of those, as you seem to be bragging there,
projecting your good fortune and ability to hire people as if
*everyone* were so well off financially as to be able to hire
people? Just because *you* are rich enough to just hire people to
work for you any time you feel like it, doesn't mean the rest of us
are so rich. The majority of us who don't have huge cash reserves,
and in particular the 20% of USA residents who are unable to find a
paying job during this recession, really don't like your arrogant
attitude as if we could just go out to hire somebody any time we
feel like hiring somebody.
Put up or shut up. Show me exactly where I wrote something that
gave you the absurd idea that I'm trying to build a money-making
enterprise, or post a public retraction and apology. You've been
posting under your real name, and you can be found by a process
server through your attglobal customer status, and you are
financially very very well off, enough so that you have money to
hire people any time you feel like hiring anyone, so well off that
you can't imagine there is anybody without such large archive of
money, so you *can* be sued for libel if you persist in libeling
me.
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> You seem to have a strange definition of a "survey". Assuming
> you're not talking about land surveys, I define a survey as a set
> of questions asked of a bunch of people to determine opinion
> about something.
Perhaps "poll" would be a better term for what I'm planning. Like
there's an election for President, and you conduct a poll just to
find out how people are planning to vote. You don't bring in any
other questions, just all candidates for that *one* office.
When you do a survey on people's opinions about something, and go
door to door trying to find somebody willing to answer your survey,
it would be silly to go to all that trouble but then ask just one
question. So a door-to-door poll usually has more than one
question, hence your idea what the term "survey" means. But over
the InterNet, where people choose which question to answer, and
then select a pre-loaded response or fill in a blank to create a
brand-new response, there's no major overhead in going into and out
from a survey question, so there's no reason to lump several
different (but hopefully related) questions into a single survey
and require the user to answer *all* of them before exiting the
survey.
Now if my new feature becomes very popular, and there thousands of
questions simultaneously available, I'll surely have them organized
into topic areas, whereby the user can select a topic, see the
questions in that topic, the choose which questions within that
topic to answer and which to pass on. Such a topic of questions
would more like what you envision as a "survey". Sorry for my
confusing terminology. But I'm glad I got some good feedback from
you before I borrowed tens of thousdands of dollars to put an ad on
a television network during prime time only to realize later that I
confused everyone with faulty terminology and thereby wasted my
borrowed money.
> People are overloaded with such surveys, to the point that there
> are not enough hours in a day to answer them all, so you
> generally have to bribe people, minimally with "a chance to win",
> or better with cash, to get people to answer them.
That's if you have been hired by a political candidate or a company
etc. to conduct a survey on a topic chosen by that candidate or
company, and you need to find ten thousand people before Monday to
answer it. You need to bribe most of those ten thousand people to
answer your survey before your deadline to turn in your results to
your employer.
But I know that people on a regular basis post their opinions on
various topics to newsgroups and other discussion forums, and they
post their opinions in their blogs, and they post their opinions on
Twitter, and some people call radio talk shows to express their
opinion about the topic of the day, going to great expense of time
and long distance phone calls to call again and again until they
get through then wait on hold for ten or twenty minutes until it's
their turn to be on the air. And some people write or telephone
their congressional or other representative, and join protest
events. So I know that if people get to choose the topic, they will
express their opinion without needing to be bribed.
> Many (most?) surveys are sales pitches in disguise, and are often
> considered SPAM.
(Nit: SPAM with all caps is a commercial brand of lunchmeat, and
use of that word for any other purpose is a trademark violation.
Don't let Hormel catch you doing that again! See the WikiPedia
entry if you don't believe me.)
Yeah. There's no way I'll be putting these survey questions in
people's mailboxes, or even blasting them at my users in pop-up
windows or banner ads etc. There will be one menu item that offers
users to express their opinion on a question of their choice, and
if they choose that item they will see menu of options, as I
described in my previous posting, so it's not at all like spam,
where it's IN YOUR FACE all the time.
By the way, my system *will* have a new form of commercial
advertising, not initially for monetary profit, but for advocacy of
my personal rants. And users *wlll* be paid (labor credits, not
cash) to memorize my rants. I hope eventually some commercial
advertising agency will see the value in my memorize-the-ad
technique and divert some of their funds from Google's click-ads to
my memorize-the-ads. Here is what will be one of my first rant ads:
_____-____ ________ beat me up more than fourty times, two times so
seriously that the police called in their photographer to take
pictures of my whole body to use as evidence in a criminal trial
for felony battery.
_____ _______ smoked a cigarette while using paint thinner to clean
up a paint spill in a paint store, then dropped the still-lit
cigarette onto the paint-thinner-wet floor, causing a fire that
destroyed the store and destroyed the entire rest of the city-block
full of warehouses for the personal storage company "U-Store-It",
destroying everything I owned except what happened to be in my car
at the time.
When I had a new idea for how a computer program could teach "word
problems" to math students, and told my boss ____ ____ in private,
because I was too shy to bring it up in a group meeting, he
pressureed me to bring up my new idea at the next group meeting,
saying he'd support me in my presentation. At that next group
meeting, he told the group that I had a new idea to present. I then
presented my idea to the group. Then he immediately humiliated me
in front of our entire group by telling me point blank right out
loud in front of everyone that the only reason I put forward that
idea was for self-agrandizement.
> A survey is not something people "invest" in.
Tell that to the professional lobbyists who "invest" in ownership
of the way our representatives vote in Congress. If my surveys
become well respected as a fair (impartial) expression of how
people feel on various issues they care about enough to spend a few
extra seconds of labor to express their interests (the time to
perform labor to earn the labor credits to invest, plus the time to
run through the survey part of my system to transfer those credits
into a particular answer to a particular survey question), a lot
more impartial than some other survey methods because it's labor
rather than money that determines how much weight each person will
get, so everyone gets a fair shot to spend the time and thus get
the vote, and consequently our representatives in Congress start to
watch my surveys as one additional source of impartial advice for
how they might vote on issues people really care about, then people
will become very eager to express their opinion in my surveys, and
consequently will spend a lot more time earning labor credits to
apply to my surveys, thus contributing a lot more labor to my
cooperative system. If not, if my surveys never become so very
popular and respected by the media and our representatives, then my
surveys will remain just a curious diversion, except insofar as the
one survey about what features to implement in NewEco will be
somewhat valuable.
> The SEC might be very interested in surveys that people are asked
> to invest in, even in imaginary currencies.
Since I never promise, and never deliver, any financial return on
investment, not even return in the form of more labor credits out
than originally invested, my surveys are in no way like a financial
investment system. They are more like "invest in the future by
joining the Sierra Club, get to vote on issues that affect our
environment, only paying members may vote on Sierra Club policy",
except I don't ask people to keep paying to maintain membership,
and the money invested is there any time the person wants to take
it back out, and it's the total in the account rather than dues
paid this last month that determine voting weight. So it's really
more analagous to "put this sign on your front yard if you like a
particular policy, and so long as it stays up you will be
continuing to influence policy by people seeing your sign, and you
may take down the sign any time you want, and re-paint the sign for
something else, ore even use the wood for construction of a
doghouse if you want". So basically my "surveys" are a cooperative
billboard system. The more labor people invest in a particular
billboard, the larger that billboard is, and if no more money is
put in the billboard stays the same size indefinitely, and if
people take money out the billboard shrinks, and if *all*
investment is removed the billboad dissappears.
I think the SEC would be very embarrassed if they made the mistake
of accusing a cooperative billboard as some kind of money scam.
> Other agencies might be more interested if the term "invest"
> turned out to really mean "wager".
I absolutely will *not* set up any kind of lottery, based on random
numbers or pseudo-random numbers or chaotic events etc., to give
some people more back than others for equal investments. Everyone
who invests (deposits in a bank-like thingy) gets equal effect per
equal deposit, so long as the invested labor remains on deposit.
> State lotteries hate competition.
Yeah. Those lotteries are gross scams, and they use dishonest
tricks to convince suckers to take their chances. I wouldn't want
to get my hands **DIRTY** by stooping to anything remotely like
state lotteries.
> You have one or more surveys, which each consist of one or more
> questions,
No, sorry for confusing terminology, hopefully resolved at the top
of this response. I have two or more surveys (starting with the two
I listed already), each of which has *ONE* (1) question. Put
another way, I have two or more survey-QUESTIONS.
> which often have two or more multiple-choice answers,
Correct.
> or sometimes free-form answers.
*AND* *always* a blank space to add a new answer to the
multiple-choice options available to everyone who looks at this
question in the future.
With a pre-printed survey form, you need to decide in advance where to
have restricted choices and where to have free-form answer, but with
these computer self-bootstrapping survey questions anyone at any time
can propose a new answer to a given question, which upon *my* approval
will become an officially-available multiple-choice answer.
> A survey will have zero or more user responses, which consist of
> the survey being answered, perhaps user identification, and a set
> of answers (including a possible no-answer answer) to the questions
> asked.
Anyone is free to choose which questions to answer, thus in effect
no-answer to all the rest of the questions not chosen.
> You might have a varying number of votes used on a survey (or on
> individual questions) if users get to decide where to spend
> voting credits.
Yes. The total number of millisecond credits deposited in *all* the
various answers to a particular question is an indicator of how
important people feel that issue is, and the relative number of
millisecond credits deposited in one answer rather than another is
an indication of which answer people prefer.
> The above paragraph might have some clues as to the appropriate
> table structure for surveys.
Given that each "survey" is just one question, I think my
originally proposed three tables (in addition to the user-accounts
table I already have) are "just right" for isolated questions not
organized into topics.
> It is generally considered very bad form to have a database
> column consisting of the name of a database table.
There's a reason for that. At the present, I imagine a small or medium
number of totally off-the-wall questions, such as what should we
do in Afghanistan, or who should be the next President after Obama,
or who is the most beautiful woman in the world (my choice:
Allison Hannigan), or what do you hope happens to Bernie Madoff
while he's in prison, etc. So for the moment, the linkage will be
MetaSurvey > anySurveyQuestion > oneAnswer > investment < userAccount
Note each table is one-to-many except investment which is many-to-many.
But at some time in the future I might group several related survey
questions into a topic, and have an extra table, and then the
linkage will be:
MetaSurvey > anyTopic > anySurveyQuestion > oneAnswer > investment < userAccount
So I might have a different table of stand-alone questions compared
ot questions which are parts of multi-question topics. Hence
needing in the oneAnswer table to say not just the numeric ID of
the question but the name of the *table* in which that numeic ID is
meaningful. If you can think of a better table layout that serves
the same potential for growth, please suggest your proposed
amendment to my proposed table spec.
> Usually the solution to this is to take all of the tables that
> might be named here, put them in one big table, then add a column
> with the former "table name" (or, for efficiency, use an integer ID
> instead of the name) in it.
Hmm, I'll have to think about it. After you read what I wrote just
above as to *why* I put the table name there, do you still have the
same proposed amendment. Note that the new table might not have the
same structure (column definitions) as the first table of survey
questions, and in any case it wouldn't be possible to know in
advance all the possible columns I might ever want in order to be
able to include all possible columns in your proposed master table
that emulates multiple tables. Naming the table explicitly means I
can later add a totally different shape of table for new survey
questions yet still have a reference to it from the oneAnswer
table.
Note: The "table name" column needn't be an absolute table name. It
could just as well be a virtual/logical table name. Thus if the
actual table name being referenced there is "surveyQuestions1", the
virtual name could be "sq1" or "surque1". The PHP code that
displays all the answers for a given question would automatically
do the mapping from the name of the table containing the questios
to the string to be expected in all answers for that question.
Renaming my second table from 'suritems' to 'suranswers' per the
confusion the old name caused:
$query = "SELECT * IN suritems WHERE surtab='surque1' and id='" . $id . "'";
> I find it strange that you are building in an incentive for the
> system implementor to make the system slower and therefore earn
> more currency back.
That's a good point. What I do for *user* timings, to avoid
rewarding people for being slower in answering a Turing question,
is to configure a fixed payment amount for each question, letting
the user decide how hard a question to attempt hence how many
seconds of credit to receive for a correct answer, and to give
exactly that amount of credit for a 100% correct answer regardless
of whether the user answered it slower or faster than expected. But
to make the value of each question a more reasonable estimate of
true difficulty for *future* users trying to answer the same
question, if this user takes more than 2 seconds more or less time
than expected, thus showing the pre-assigned value of that question
is seriously out of line with reality, I do this:
- If the user takes two or more seconds *longer* than expected, I
increase that registered value of that question by one second.
Thus if just one person finds it very difficult, it gets bumped
up by just one, but if lots of people find it difficult, it
bumps upward one by one by one until it's within two seconds of
the slowest users.
- If the user takes two or more seconds *less* time than expected,
the resistered value of that question gets bumped halfway from
the old value to how that one "speedy Gonzalis" took, ceiling
thereof. Thus if the question is universally easier than
expected, it rapidly converges downward towards the fast actual
data.
With a mix of fast and slow users, the slow users bump it upward
only one second at a time, while the fast users bump it down
rapidly, so over a long span of time the registered value of each
question converges to approximately two or three seconds longer
(slower) than the fastest users. Thus the fastest users will get
paid at higher than the going wage, the big bulk of people
sllightly slower will get paid right about exactly the going wage,
and the super slowbies will get paid less than the going wage
because that's all they're worth, except even they get paid two or
three seconds more than they're *really* worth by the standard of
the fastest users. If we think of the "going rate" as like "minimum
wage", the bulk of people get paid almost exaclty minimum wage,
speedy Gonzalis gets paid more than minimum wage, doing the same
work in two or three seconds less time than the pay, and total
lusers can take as long as they want to but won't get paid any more
than minimum wage would have been if they were of normal ability.
Hopefully somebody so very slow that they take much longer to
complete a task than what they're getting paid, will realize they
are wasting their time doing that kind of work, and find some other
kind of work where they are more competitive. But in no case will I
reward very slow people proportional to their slowness, by paying
them directly for the time they actualy take instead of how long
the majority of skilled workers take for the same task.
So what I'm thinking now, in response to your critique, is that I
should use a similar algorithm for setting in advance a fixed cost
for each new operation the user might select, so the user knows in
advance how much it'll cost him/her for selecting that option, and
the user is never hit by an unexpectedly huge bill just because
that user was unfortunate enough to hit a moment when the server
was very busy and took an unusualy long time to complete a
normally-fast task.
But I couldn't use the two-second rule as for humans, because most
CGI scripts complete in ten or twenty milliseconds, so they would
*never* take two full seconds longer than the 10-20 milliseconds
expected, never, never ever. At most they might take 100
milliseconds when 10 or 20 was the norm. So I'd have to set a lower
threshold for automatic adjustment of the predicted-hence-charged
time of a PHP script-run. I'll have to think of this some more.
Thanks for the critique on that point.
> Remember, script run time can be dominated by database locks,
> which aren't the specific user's fault and can greatly vary
> between separate accesses to the same script.
I was going to say that these PHP/MySQL hosting services don't
support table-locking. But you said database locking. So you're
saying if one of my users has requested an UPDATE operation on one
table, other users will be locked out of that entire database for
the duration of that table UPDATE? Since transaction mode is *not*
supported in these hosting servers, each different table UPDATE
will be a separate action, and so locking the database will be very
very brief, at most the length of time of one UPDATE, or if there's
a queue then all the UPDATEs that were in the queue already, some
other user wanting to get a service request will at most have to
wait for how long it takes to do a very small number of already
queued table-UPDATE operations. (Actually, SELECT might have higher
precedence than UPDATE, so if there are several UPDATEs in the
queue, plus one currently in progress, all the SELECT requests that
arrive during that one UPDATE will be satisfied immediately after
the current UPDATE, before the next UPDATE already in the queue. Is
this correct?)
> Assuming for the moment you have a Presidential Election Survey,
> the List of surveys would have an item for "Presidential Election
> Survey",
That would be the short title. The long title would say something
like what you say next:
> "Who would you vote for if the Presidential Election were held today?",
> and perhaps one user spent 3 quatloos
Milliseconds of human-labor time, equated to the same quantity of
server script-run time.
> in favor of the election,
No, in favor of one particular candidate, perhaps a write-in if I
approve that particular write-in after it's been nominated before
any funds can be invested in it. No, I won't approve "Donald Duck",
nor any of George Carlin's 7 words for President of the USA.
You got confused by my confused terminology.
Each survey is one question. Each "item" is one answer to that question.
Sorry to confuse you to where you ran down a red herring lane.
> which would show up in the investment table.
Yes.
> See something missing?
Not per my original intention, only per your mis-reading of my
intention due to my faulty jargon. Sorry again.
> Usually a user would select a candidate, like Obama or McCain, or
> vote For or Against a proposition, and the list of answers is often
> (but not always) associated with the question.
Yes. Per my misleading jargon:
ListOfSurveys > oneSurvey > oneItem > oneInvestment < oneUser
Per less misleading jargon:
ListOfPollQuestions > oneQuestion > oneAnswer > oneInvestment < oneUser
OK now?
> For this survey if done before the primaries, you'd probably want
> a way to add (non-obscene) write-in candidates as the
> political landscape changes.
That's why there will always be a fill-in-blank available among the
answers to any question, and why such a filled-in write-in
candidate is visible *only* to the person who proposed it and to me
in my role as master, until and unless I approve it for public
display.
Note: If this system gets super large, as I hope it to get
eventually, I won't be able to personally censor every submission
every user ever makes. That's when http://TinyURL.Com/RevTre will
become useful here. Please read that WebPage before reading this
text which depends on understanding the general concept.
After you've read that, now this: The first round of any reverse
tree will be to filter out obscene words (George Carlin's 7
mostly), and abusive or illegal language text, and for places where
photographic images are submitted by users (such as a poll of what
is the best photo of Alison Hanigan, pick from one of these images
shown here) I'll also have first-round reverse-tree people provide
porn/nudity ratings, such as G for really decent stuff that would
be allowed to walk around at Disneyland, PG-13 for overtly sexual
but fully clothed poses such as woman in cross-your-heart bra in
tight sweater deliberately sticking it out like Anne Margaret did
during the trailer of the movie "Bye Bye Birdie", also PG-13 for
showing cleavage or peek at breast, etc., R for bare breast, X for
bare crotch or penis, XX for soft porn such as fondling breasts or
penis or finger-fucking or cunnlingus or blow-job, XXX for explicit
sexual intercourse or sodomy.
For obvious reasons, only people over 18 who consent to possible
exposure to abusive language or blatant pornography, in the context
of censoring such, would be allowed to filter the first round of
user-submissions. Anyone purporting to be over 18 would need to be
vetted via my proposed LinkII whereby people post "friend" links of
people they know in Real Life and *know* to be over 18. If there's
a chain of over-18 links from myself personally to somebody
claiming to be over 18, then I make contact with each person along
the chain to make sure they know they may be required to testify in
court that their friend is over 18, if I should ever be accused of
allowing under-age people who just *say* they are over 18 to view
porn via my system.
Thus everything that gets past the first stage of reverse-tree
filtering is:
- Definitely not containing any obscene words or abusive language.
- Definitely not containing any illegal content such as child-porn.
- Is rated according to porn/nude rating, so that I can make sure
no inapproprate (under-age, except for PG-13 with parent's consent)
viewing of porn occurs.
After stage one, later stages are merely to be absolutely sure
there's a concensus among multiple reviewers/filtereres that the
submission really is approprate for the purpose for which it was
submitted, in this case a particular survey/poll. As I get to trust
my reviewers/filtereres, I'll automate the process, so that
anything that gets to the top of the reverse tree is automatically
accepted for public view without me needing to personally review
it, but I'd do a random sample of such items from time to time to
make sure my reviewers/filtereres haven't gone rogue on me.
> Palin's name wasn't mentioned at all early in the campaign.
It's bad it was *ever* mentionned. But to be fair, my system would
have allowed Sarah herself to nominate herself for VP, and if she
worked really hard to earn labor-credits she could promote herself
as high as she wanted, limited only by the fact there are only 24
hours in the day, so as soon as she started showing in the top ten
candidates then people who agreed with me that she was a shoddy
candidate would spend *their* time to promote *other* candidates,
and with ten thousand people spending an hour per day promoting
another candidate, there's no way Sarah Palin all by herself with
only 24 hours per day could compete, so she'd drop back out of the
top ten for VP. So she'd be a flash in the pan by eager
self-promotion, then out of the picture, until John McCain formally
chose her, at which point tens of thousands of McCain supporters
would suddenly start spending their time promoting her for VP,
except for the ones who agreed with me that she's crap, who would
just as actively spend their time promoting other candidates, and
it'd be a real contest whether McCain supporters agreed with his
choice for VP or not.
Jerry Stuckle
>> None of this has anything to do with PHP.
>
> Most of this new system (and *all* the code so-far written) is PHP.
> How does this not have anything to with PHP??
> Are you asleep at the keyboard, just not thinking before you post?
>
What is your PHP question? I don't see any. In fact, the only thing I
see related to PHP is a vague reference to the fact you're going to use it.
NOTHING in your post is PHP specific.
>> And you're asking for people to donate their time to your
>> money-making project?
>
> If you read the entire document at http://TinyURL.Com/NewEco, and
> somehow you got the idea this was a money-making project, then my
> writing skill must be far worse than atrocious, because you've
> gotten a totally wrong idea of my plan. I would *really* appreciate
> if you'd go back through that Web page and cite exactly where I
> said something that gave you the mistaken idea that this will be a
> money-making project. Once I see how what I wrote gave you a
> mistaken impression, then I will know which text needs re-writing
> to communicate better.
>
So? You want help, hire it.
Oh, so now you're going to sue me? Go ahead, idiot, and try it. I'll
end up owning almost everything you have for your false lawsuit.
Now we know what you really are. A self-serving crook.
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> What is your PHP question? I don't see any.
After the contract system in NewEco is implemented, my PHP
questions will be asked to users of NewEco. I'll post a RFB
(Request For Bids) or each such question, and some PHP expert will
make a bid, how many seconds of time it'll take to answer the PHP
question and submit the answer back to the server, and the lowest
bidder will get the contract, and complete it within the allowed
time-window, and get paid in labor credits which can be used on
NewEco to purchase services from others and/or purchase computer
services directly from NewEco.
In the mean time, before the PHP code to run the contract system is
fully implemented, I'll do the contracts manually, but the same
overall system.
> In fact, the only thing I see related to PHP is a vague reference
> to the fact you're going to use it.
The OP (Original Posting) contained a link to http://TinyURL.Com/NewEco
which explains all that, which I've summarized above.
> NOTHING in your post is PHP specific.
Here's a direct quote from http://TinyURL.Com/NewEco:
Most urgent major NewEco tasks require low-level software tools to be
developed (seeking volunteers to help with implementation of these
software modules):
* PHP/MySQL -- for maintaining data-store of:
+ user accounts, including personal profiles for job-ad
filtering
+ archive of job ads, including value-added tagging
+ status of auctions (for contracts, and for value-futures of
completed work)
+ nearly everything else that requires persistent storage
Update 2009.Mar.30: None of the free PHP/MySQL Web sites that I've
discovered are working in any suitable way, and I'm desperately in
need of such a site that actually works.
Update 2009.Apr.18: I've finally found five free PHP/MySQL Web
sites which seem to work for the most basic tasks I've tried
so-far: List databases, List tables, create new table.
Here's another excerpt from http://TinyURL.Com/NewEco:
* PHP-BigIntegerPwrMod (for public-key communication between all
components)
Update 2009.Mar.07: symcbean showed me a built-in PHP module called
"BC", which I tried and found to work satisfactorily. I'll need to
convert back and forth between byte-vectors and
decimal-digit-strings, but that won't be too difficult using BC to
do the arithmetic needed for conversion.
Furthermore, the software located via the link http://TinyURL.Com/Portl1
is currently *entirely* written in PHP, for ordinary data-processing
and for submitting MySQL tasks and getting back result-sets.
If you had clicked on that link in my OP, and then done a keyword
search for "PHP" within that Web page, you could have answered your
own question.
> So? You want help, hire it.
That's exactly what I'm doing, except that I have no $money$, so
I'm offering to pay labor-credits for work performed, and then
these labor-credits can be used to purchase direct services from
NewEco (as soon as enough PHP code has been written to provide the
services) and to hire other users (as soon as enough PHP code has
been written to implement the contract system).
> Oh, so now you're going to sue me?
Sure, you keep piling on the libelous remarks, accusing me of using
NewEco as a front for getting $money$ from users, despite the fact
that no user will *ever* need to pay any money into NewEco, users
will need to perform *labor* instead to pay for their usage of
NewEco. Ten seconds of human labor pays for ten thousand
milliseconds of PHP usage which typically is about a hundred to a
thousand separate script-runs. You've spent more than ten seconds
composing your libel against me. You could have done better
spending your ten seconds working for NewEco instead of attacking
it.
> Go ahead, idiot, and try it.
I'm not an idiot. My Mensa IQ test shows my IQ to be in the top 1%,
which qualifies as not-idiot, not-stupid, not-average,
not-mediocre, not sub-genius but *full*genius*. And my record of
inventions (see another newsgrour article a couple weeks ago) shows
this genius is not just passive stuff like you might see at Mensa
meetings or on "Big Bang Theory" during Klingon Boggle games, but a
truly valuable *creative*/*inventive* genius.
> I'll end up owning almost everything you have for your false
> lawsuit.
Oh I would love you to own everything I currently own, including
$60,000 of credit card debt. You may have my credit-card debt any
time you want it. Just fill out the paperwork to take over my
debts. Go ahead. I dare you.
> Now we know what you really are. A self-serving crook.
Now you've crossed the line from probable-libel to uncontrovertable libel.
Google search: Jerry Stuckle JDS Computer Training Corp.
ICCA Consultant Member
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
9920 Brixton Lane
Bethesda, MD 20817
Phone: 301-469-6604
Email: Contact Form
As soon as I find somebody in Maryland willing to file legal papers
in Maryland on my behalf, for libel lawsuit against you, and
somebody (probably the same person) to serve them on you, be
expecting a knock on your door, and when you open the door somebody
thrusts a packet of papers at you and says "you're served" and
walks away, and if you don't show up in court as ordered to show
cause why a summary judgement of libel against you shouldn't be
issued, a default judgement will indeed be issued. Next comes the
fun part, attachment of your wages, by whatever collection agency I
sell the judgement to, perhaps Midland Credit Management, Inc. of
Oaks, PA, or maybe First National Collection Bureau, Inc. of
McCarran NV.
Since 1990, JDS Computer Training Corporation has provided high-quality
programmer training courses to customers throughout the United States
and in Asia and Europe. ...
I think I know why you feel so threatened by my attempt to build
NewEco which will provide online computer-programming on-the-job
training, which will put *your* company out of business. Why would
any student in their right mind take out a student loan to pay cash
to *your* company for training, with no definite prospect of actual
employment as a result, yet the debt collectors hounding the
still-unemployed fully-trained computer programmer for repayment of
the loan, when they could join NewEco, get incremental training to
learn computer programming, immediately put it to use, no up-front
payment to NewEco needed to get the training, and they even get
*paid* for all completed student assignments. Your company will be
out of business within a year, and *you* will be out of a job. So
you think that if you libel me enough, it will somehow discourage
other people from seeing the value in NewEco, so that NewEco will
never fully develop, and hence never put your company out of
business by providing a better alternative for computer-programming
students.
Jerry Stuckle
Yes, and nothing in there is PHP specific - other than the fact you want
to use PHP.
>> So? You want help, hire it.
>
> That's exactly what I'm doing, except that I have no $money$, so
> I'm offering to pay labor-credits for work performed, and then
> these labor-credits can be used to purchase direct services from
> NewEco (as soon as enough PHP code has been written to provide the
> services) and to hire other users (as soon as enough PHP code has
> been written to implement the contract system).
>
No, you're not. You're looking for some sucker to provide their time
for free.
Tell me - do you work for free? Or does your employer pay you? If he
pays you, why should someone work for you for free. You want help? Be
prepared to pay for it.
Now that's not to say programmers (including me) don't do pro bono work.
But I do it for open source projects and recognized charities I
believe in. Not for someone too cheap to pay.
>> Oh, so now you're going to sue me?
>
> Sure, you keep piling on the libelous remarks, accusing me of using
> NewEco as a front for getting $money$ from users, despite the fact
> that no user will *ever* need to pay any money into NewEco, users
> will need to perform *labor* instead to pay for their usage of
> NewEco. Ten seconds of human labor pays for ten thousand
> milliseconds of PHP usage which typically is about a hundred to a
> thousand separate script-runs. You've spent more than ten seconds
> composing your libel against me. You could have done better
> spending your ten seconds working for NewEco instead of attacking
> it.
>
>> Go ahead, idiot, and try it.
>
> I'm not an idiot. My Mensa IQ test shows my IQ to be in the top 1%,
> which qualifies as not-idiot, not-stupid, not-average,
> not-mediocre, not sub-genius but *full*genius*. And my record of
> inventions (see another newsgrour article a couple weeks ago) shows
> this genius is not just passive stuff like you might see at Mensa
> meetings or on "Big Bang Theory" during Klingon Boggle games, but a
> truly valuable *creative*/*inventive* genius.
>
Whoopie! So you claim to be a genius. OK, genius, then you should have
no problem designing the database and writing the code yourself. In
fact, if you're so great, you should be able to absorb everything you
know and do all the work in just a couple of weeks.
But then we all know that IQ tests do not measure real world ability -
or real world sense. All they measure is the ability to take a test.
>> I'll end up owning almost everything you have for your false
>> lawsuit.
>
> Oh I would love you to own everything I currently own, including
> $60,000 of credit card debt. You may have my credit-card debt any
> time you want it. Just fill out the paperwork to take over my
> debts. Go ahead. I dare you.
>
ROFLMAO!
>> Now we know what you really are. A self-serving crook.
>
> Now you've crossed the line from probable-libel to uncontrovertable libel.
>
> Google search: Jerry Stuckle JDS Computer Training Corp.
> ICCA Consultant Member
> Jerry Stuckle
> JDS Computer Training Corp.
> 9920 Brixton Lane
> Bethesda, MD 20817
> Phone: 301-469-6604
> Email: Contact Form
> As soon as I find somebody in Maryland willing to file legal papers
> in Maryland on my behalf, for libel lawsuit against you, and
> somebody (probably the same person) to serve them on you, be
> expecting a knock on your door, and when you open the door somebody
> thrusts a packet of papers at you and says "you're served" and
> walks away, and if you don't show up in court as ordered to show
> cause why a summary judgement of libel against you shouldn't be
> issued, a default judgement will indeed be issued. Next comes the
> fun part, attachment of your wages, by whatever collection agency I
> sell the judgement to, perhaps Midland Credit Management, Inc. of
> Oaks, PA, or maybe First National Collection Bureau, Inc. of
> McCarran NV.
>
Be my guest. I'm not hard to find. And once I give the papers to my
attorney, the lawsuits you'll see what a REAL lawsuit is. Good luck
trying to find an attorney who will work for you pro bono. They like to
get paid, also.
> Since 1990, JDS Computer Training Corporation has provided high-quality
> programmer training courses to customers throughout the United States
> and in Asia and Europe. ...
>
> I think I know why you feel so threatened by my attempt to build
> NewEco which will provide online computer-programming on-the-job
> training, which will put *your* company out of business. Why would
> any student in their right mind take out a student loan to pay cash
> to *your* company for training, with no definite prospect of actual
> employment as a result, yet the debt collectors hounding the
> still-unemployed fully-trained computer programmer for repayment of
> the loan, when they could join NewEco, get incremental training to
> learn computer programming, immediately put it to use, no up-front
> payment to NewEco needed to get the training, and they even get
> *paid* for all completed student assignments. Your company will be
> out of business within a year, and *you* will be out of a job. So
> you think that if you libel me enough, it will somehow discourage
> other people from seeing the value in NewEco, so that NewEco will
> never fully develop, and hence never put your company out of
> business by providing a better alternative for computer-programming
> students.
I'm not threatened by you or your site. They won't affect my business
at all, any more than any of the thousands of similar sites have
affected my business.
--
==================
Remove the "x" from my email address
Jerry Stuckle
JDS Computer Training Corp.
jstu...@attglobal.net
==================
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
using PHP to implement some core features of the system)
> From: Jerry Stuckle <jstuck...@attglobal.net>
> ... nothing in there is PHP specific - other than the fact you
> want to use PHP.
And information about specific actual progress implementing
specific core functions needed to make NewEco a reality. You said
it had *nothing* to do with PHP. Clearly you were mistaken, or more
likely, outright lying.
> > I'm offering to pay labor-credits for work performed, and then
> > these labor-credits can be used to purchase direct services from
> > NewEco (as soon as enough PHP code has been written to provide the
> > services) and to hire other users (as soon as enough PHP code has
> > been written to implement the contract system).
> No, you're not.
So at that point you're flat-out calling me a liar, claiming that I
have no intention of setting up a system whereby people can do work
for me and thereby earn labor credits that can later be spent in
the two ways I cite there?
> You're looking for some sucker to provide their time for free.
Nope, they trade their labor for credits that can pay for somebody
else's labor later. That's the same as if they got paid $money$ and
later used that $money$ to purchase labor from others, except that
$money$ is dependent on exchange rates and a blind trust that
inflation won't wipe out the value of the money, that these pieces
of paper will actually be worth something later, whereas my labor
credits are fixed for all time as so many seconds of human labor,
so they can't possibly suffer from inflation.
> Tell me - do you work for free?
Yes, but I'd rather not, I'd much rather somebody pay me for my
work. NewEco is an attempt to get *something* in return for my
work, not $money$, because almost nobody seems to have any of it
nowadays, and those few who *do* have money haven't seen fit to
hire me to work for them, but labor exchange. Instead of getting
people to pay me money for my work, I hope to get people to perform
labor for me in exchange for my labor I perform. Direct barter is
unlikely to work, because the people who directly need *my*
particular skills aren't the same people who can provide labor I
specifically need, hence the labor credits as a means of common
exchange. I already did the preliminary set-up work, and will do
some more shortly, and then others will perform work for my system,
thereby paying me back for my investment in labor building the
preliminary system. Most of the work these people do will result in
their being paid labor credits, only a small amount will be
consumed in the overhead of operating the system itself. These
labor credits will be used mostly to hire others to do work those
early workers want done, so the labor credits will pass from hand
to hand, until it arrives in the hand of somebody who wants to hire
**me** to do some work *I* am good at doing.
> Or does your employer pay you?
Nope.
> If he pays you,
False antecedent, making the rest of what you say moot:
> why should someone work for you for free.
That's also moot because I have no intention of having people work
for me and not get paid for their work. If they do labor by
contract bid, where they say they can complete the contract in 3
minutes, and in fact they complete it in 3 minutes, then they get
paid 3 minutes of labor credits, which they will be able to spend
almost like real $money$ to purchase services from my system or pay
other users to work directly for them through my system that merely
provides a work+pay framework.
> You want help? Be prepared to pay for it.
That's precisely what I intend to do. Once my system is fully
operational, there'll be no more of posting questions to newsgroups
asking for volunteers to provide free help by posting the help as a
follow-up in the newsgroup. Instead I'll direct people to NewEco
where whoever provides the answer to my question will get *paid*
through my system, labor-credits to spend later through my system.
> Now that's not to say programmers (including me) don't do pro
> bono work.
Perhaps you will provide pro bono work for NewEco? It's a truly
worthwhile idea that you really ought to contribute to. But I'm
only suggesting that because you seem to be bragging about how you
sometimes do pro bono work. Normally I'd ask you to work through my
system and get paid (in labor credits) for all your work. No pro
bono work needed in NewEco. But if you want to offer pro bono work,
because you seem to like bragging about doing it, I won't turn down
your offer.
> But I do it for open source projects
Eventually the code I've already written, and will write soon, to
implement NewEco may become open source. In addition, if I pay for
code that people wrote to help build functionality of NewEco, I
have no objection to the coders leaking that code out to third
parties, posting as open source, etc.
> and recognized charities I believe in.
Since NewEco will eventually provide minimum-wage jobs to everyone
who wants to work and has any useful skills, even skills that fall
outside the traditional job market, you may consider NewEco to be a
form of charity. If you believe, as I do, that everyone who wants
to work for pay should be entitled to a paying job, that while free
money shouldn't be an entitlement, a paying *job*, a work-for-pay
situation, *should* be an entitlement, then you should "believe in"
NewEco and provide your personal labor, and possibly some $cash$
funds, to make it a reality. I don't ask you pay *me* cash for *my*
labor. Rather I ask that you pvovide cash that *other* users of my
system can receive by "cashing in" their labor credits. But first,
you need to pay the cost of various professional help that NewEco
needs before it can legally deal with money passing through to
users. In particular you need to pay for the overhead involved in
verifying that people are legal residents of the USA and that they
are legally entitled to work for pay and that they are not wanted
by the law on some outstanding warrant, and to verify their
taxpayer ID number so that they can be legally paid and so that the
IRS can receive accurate reports of their wages and so that legally
mandated withholding can be done on their conversions from labor
credits to $pay$.
> Not for someone too cheap to pay.
When you say "too cheap", do you refer to my lack of funds to pay,
or some hypothetical situation in which I had lots of money but
still refused to pay for people to work for me?
Believe me, if I had all my debts paid off, and an extra million
dollars, I'd surely use half of that million dollars to hire people
to do things for me that I've been unable to get done so-far
because of no funds to hire these people. Perhaps your company can
purchase one of my major inventions and that will be enough funds
to pay off my debts and give me extra funds to hire people to work
for me?
> So you claim to be a genius.
Sure. Do you want to fly from Maryland to California so that I can
show you the physical certificate I got from Mensa which told me my
raw score and percentile rank on the two IQ tests I took under
their supervision?
> OK, genius, then you should have no problem designing the
> database and writing the code yourself.
I only started writing PHP/MySQL code a few months ago. Although I
am very bright, still I realize that my very first attempts no
matter how brilliant might possibly benefit from a second bright
mind helping me with the design. In fact, Gordon Burditt has
already given me valuable feedback on my first-draft design plus an
actual idea how to do something related to it. But mostly what he
posted indicates that my first-draft design of the three new tables
needed for surveys was basically on-track, just the proposed names
for them, and my explanations of them, were somewhat confusing to
readers, so I'll fix that aspect of my design and post an updated
second-draft design which I hope will be acceptable to him and to
anyone else looking at my design documents.
> In fact, if you're so great, you should be able to absorb
> everything you know and do all the work in just a couple of weeks.
Now you're surely jesting. The bootstrapping to the point where
other programmers can then do work over the system to improve the
system itself and thereby get paid for their work, I might indeed
finish in a couple more weeks, but the whole NewEco concept is
*immense* and will take several man-years to fully complete.
With fifty employees, each earning labor credits, maybe we can
together complete the whole project in three months.
> But then we all know that IQ tests do not measure real world
> ability - or real world sense. All they measure is the ability
> to take a test.
You are only half right. I really liked the question where there
was a paragraph with five missing words, and for each missing word
there were five multiple-choices, and *every* one of the multiple
choices fit in just fine, so locally any answer whatsoever could be
"correct", but in fact there was only one combination out of the
5^5=3125 combinations that made the paragraph as a whole make
sense. Answering that type of question required true thinking
ability, a lot more than just the ability to "take a test". On that
test, the test with those truly thinking-required questions, I
scored over 150 IQ.
I agree a lot of the *other* types of questions on IQ tests require
more the ability to psyche out the test itself rather than
demonstrate true thinking ability. So that's where you're half right.
Jerry Stuckle
> using PHP to implement some core features of the system)
>> From: Jerry Stuckle <jstuck...@attglobal.net>
>> ... nothing in there is PHP specific - other than the fact you
>> want to use PHP.
>
> And information about specific actual progress implementing
> specific core functions needed to make NewEco a reality. You said
> it had *nothing* to do with PHP. Clearly you were mistaken, or more
> likely, outright lying.
>
Nope. I said nothing in your post had anything to do with PHP. But
you're a genius - I'm surprised you don't understand that.
>>> I'm offering to pay labor-credits for work performed, and then
>>> these labor-credits can be used to purchase direct services from
>>> NewEco (as soon as enough PHP code has been written to provide the
>>> services) and to hire other users (as soon as enough PHP code has
>>> been written to implement the contract system).
>
>> No, you're not.
>
> So at that point you're flat-out calling me a liar, claiming that I
> have no intention of setting up a system whereby people can do work
> for me and thereby earn labor credits that can later be spent in
> the two ways I cite there?
>
I never said anything of the sort. I said you are looking for free
help. Which is exactly what you want.
>> You're looking for some sucker to provide their time for free.
>
> Nope, they trade their labor for credits that can pay for somebody
> else's labor later. That's the same as if they got paid $money$ and
> later used that $money$ to purchase labor from others, except that
> $money$ is dependent on exchange rates and a blind trust that
> inflation won't wipe out the value of the money, that these pieces
> of paper will actually be worth something later, whereas my labor
> credits are fixed for all time as so many seconds of human labor,
> so they can't possibly suffer from inflation.
>
Yea, right. And let's see your reserve of that labor. Oh, wait. You
don't have one, do you? So you're making promises you can't keep.
The legal definition of that is FRAUD.
>> Tell me - do you work for free?
>
> Yes, but I'd rather not, I'd much rather somebody pay me for my
> work. NewEco is an attempt to get *something* in return for my
> work, not $money$, because almost nobody seems to have any of it
> nowadays, and those few who *do* have money haven't seen fit to
> hire me to work for them, but labor exchange. Instead of getting
> people to pay me money for my work, I hope to get people to perform
> labor for me in exchange for my labor I perform. Direct barter is
> unlikely to work, because the people who directly need *my*
> particular skills aren't the same people who can provide labor I
> specifically need, hence the labor credits as a means of common
> exchange. I already did the preliminary set-up work, and will do
> some more shortly, and then others will perform work for my system,
> thereby paying me back for my investment in labor building the
> preliminary system. Most of the work these people do will result in
> their being paid labor credits, only a small amount will be
> consumed in the overhead of operating the system itself. These
> labor credits will be used mostly to hire others to do work those
> early workers want done, so the labor credits will pass from hand
> to hand, until it arrives in the hand of somebody who wants to hire
> **me** to do some work *I* am good at doing.
>
People have lots of money. You just need to have something worth payinf
for - which clearly you don't.
>> Or does your employer pay you?
>
> Nope.
>
So you're an unemployed genius doesn't have anything that anyone is
willing to pay for. So you're trying to get people to work for free for
the promise of some "labor credits" you don't have and can't be sure of
supplying.
>> If he pays you,
>
> False antecedent, making the rest of what you say moot:
>
>> why should someone work for you for free.
>
> That's also moot because I have no intention of having people work
> for me and not get paid for their work. If they do labor by
> contract bid, where they say they can complete the contract in 3
> minutes, and in fact they complete it in 3 minutes, then they get
> paid 3 minutes of labor credits, which they will be able to spend
> almost like real $money$ to purchase services from my system or pay
> other users to work directly for them through my system that merely
> provides a work+pay framework.
>
Why would I need someone else's labor? Are you going to remodel my
house for me, for instance?
Oh, I almost forgot. You really don't have any "labor credits" - so
your point is moot.
>> You want help? Be prepared to pay for it.
>
> That's precisely what I intend to do. Once my system is fully
> operational, there'll be no more of posting questions to newsgroups
> asking for volunteers to provide free help by posting the help as a
> follow-up in the newsgroup. Instead I'll direct people to NewEco
> where whoever provides the answer to my question will get *paid*
> through my system, labor-credits to spend later through my system.
>
Then let's see the cash. Oh, I forgot. You're not actually paying
anyone anything.
>> Now that's not to say programmers (including me) don't do pro
>> bono work.
>
> Perhaps you will provide pro bono work for NewEco? It's a truly
> worthwhile idea that you really ought to contribute to. But I'm
> only suggesting that because you seem to be bragging about how you
> sometimes do pro bono work. Normally I'd ask you to work through my
> system and get paid (in labor credits) for all your work. No pro
> bono work needed in NewEco. But if you want to offer pro bono work,
> because you seem to like bragging about doing it, I won't turn down
> your offer.
>
Nope. I said for RECOGNIZED CHARITIES WHICH I SUPPORT. You are not a
charity, recognized or not. And I do not support you.
But don't worry - I wouldn't work for you for money, either. And if I
did, it would be cash in advance.
>> But I do it for open source projects
>
> Eventually the code I've already written, and will write soon, to
> implement NewEco may become open source. In addition, if I pay for
> code that people wrote to help build functionality of NewEco, I
> have no objection to the coders leaking that code out to third
> parties, posting as open source, etc.
>
So? Again - promises which probably will not be kept. Open source
projects are typically open source from the beginning - not added later.
>> and recognized charities I believe in.
>
> Since NewEco will eventually provide minimum-wage jobs to everyone
> who wants to work and has any useful skills, even skills that fall
> outside the traditional job market, you may consider NewEco to be a
> form of charity. If you believe, as I do, that everyone who wants
> to work for pay should be entitled to a paying job, that while free
> money shouldn't be an entitlement, a paying *job*, a work-for-pay
> situation, *should* be an entitlement, then you should "believe in"
> NewEco and provide your personal labor, and possibly some $cash$
> funds, to make it a reality. I don't ask you pay *me* cash for *my*
> labor. Rather I ask that you pvovide cash that *other* users of my
> system can receive by "cashing in" their labor credits. But first,
> you need to pay the cost of various professional help that NewEco
> needs before it can legally deal with money passing through to
> users. In particular you need to pay for the overhead involved in
> verifying that people are legal residents of the USA and that they
> are legally entitled to work for pay and that they are not wanted
> by the law on some outstanding warrant, and to verify their
> taxpayer ID number so that they can be legally paid and so that the
> IRS can receive accurate reports of their wages and so that legally
> mandated withholding can be done on their conversions from labor
> credits to $pay$.
>
Minimum wage? I haven't gotten minimum wage since the 1960's. And it
is not a charity - by any definition except yours.
>> Not for someone too cheap to pay.
>
> When you say "too cheap", do you refer to my lack of funds to pay,
> or some hypothetical situation in which I had lots of money but
> still refused to pay for people to work for me?
>
If your project is worth it, then you can raise the money. You're a
genius, I'm sure you can get a loan. Or find a venture capitalist
willing to invest.
> Believe me, if I had all my debts paid off, and an extra million
> dollars, I'd surely use half of that million dollars to hire people
> to do things for me that I've been unable to get done so-far
> because of no funds to hire these people. Perhaps your company can
> purchase one of my major inventions and that will be enough funds
> to pay off my debts and give me extra funds to hire people to work
> for me?
>
Then I suggest you get a real job.
>> So you claim to be a genius.
>
> Sure. Do you want to fly from Maryland to California so that I can
> show you the physical certificate I got from Mensa which told me my
> raw score and percentile rank on the two IQ tests I took under
> their supervision?
>
Nope. I really don't care. And all that proves is that you do well on
tests.
>> OK, genius, then you should have no problem designing the
>> database and writing the code yourself.
>
> I only started writing PHP/MySQL code a few months ago. Although I
> am very bright, still I realize that my very first attempts no
> matter how brilliant might possibly benefit from a second bright
> mind helping me with the design. In fact, Gordon Burditt has
> already given me valuable feedback on my first-draft design plus an
> actual idea how to do something related to it. But mostly what he
> posted indicates that my first-draft design of the three new tables
> needed for surveys was basically on-track, just the proposed names
> for them, and my explanations of them, were somewhat confusing to
> readers, so I'll fix that aspect of my design and post an updated
> second-draft design which I hope will be acceptable to him and to
> anyone else looking at my design documents.
>
But for a genius like you, it should be so easy.
>> In fact, if you're so great, you should be able to absorb
>> everything you know and do all the work in just a couple of weeks.
>
> Now you're surely jesting. The bootstrapping to the point where
> other programmers can then do work over the system to improve the
> system itself and thereby get paid for their work, I might indeed
> finish in a couple more weeks, but the whole NewEco concept is
> *immense* and will take several man-years to fully complete.
> With fifty employees, each earning labor credits, maybe we can
> together complete the whole project in three months.
>
You're the one who claimed to be a genius, not me.
And if it's that big and will be that successful, then you should be
easily able to locate funds to help yo9u.
>> But then we all know that IQ tests do not measure real world
>> ability - or real world sense. All they measure is the ability
>> to take a test.
>
> You are only half right. I really liked the question where there
> was a paragraph with five missing words, and for each missing word
> there were five multiple-choices, and *every* one of the multiple
> choices fit in just fine, so locally any answer whatsoever could be
> "correct", but in fact there was only one combination out of the
> 5^5=3125 combinations that made the paragraph as a whole make
> sense. Answering that type of question required true thinking
> ability, a lot more than just the ability to "take a test". On that
> test, the test with those truly thinking-required questions, I
> scored over 150 IQ.
>
So? All the test means is that you can take the test. Nothing more,
nothing less.
> I agree a lot of the *other* types of questions on IQ tests require
> more the ability to psyche out the test itself rather than
> demonstrate true thinking ability. So that's where you're half right.
Nope, the same is true on the Mensa test.
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
surveys/polls (within NewEco) into one Web page, and corrected some
terms that were confusing. I'll be maintaining this Web page from
time to time as I develop the code to implement surveys/polls,
instead of posting further updates here, so anyone curious how the
project is going or wishing to brainstorm with me, please look
here: http://TinyURL.Com/EcoSur
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> I said you are looking for free help.
And that was not correct. I'm looking to trade help. I help my
users, they help me.
> Which is exactly what you want.
Nope, you're wrong again.
> And let's see your reserve of that labor.
If you can use some extra labor, I'm available for the kinds of
stuff I can do, and eventually when I have lots of users their
labor will be available too. So if you can use some help, say what
kind of help you can use. If you can't use any help, then NewEco is
of no use to you personally, and so your incessant posting on this
topic is a waste of your time and energy.
> Oh, wait. You don't have one, do you?
I do. You are wrong again.
> So you're making promises you can't keep.
You are wrong again.
> The legal definition of that is FRAUD.
Even if your false claims were true, it wouldn't qualify as fraud
because I'm not asking anyone for money. So you're doubly wrong,
that your premise is wrong, and even your analysis from that wrong
premise is wrong.
> People have lots of money.
Name one person who has lots of money and would like some
computer-programming WebServer application done for them, and state
what kind of application they'd like.
> You just need to have something worth payinf for
There's a difference between sale of already-created product, where
I need to already have it fully created, ready for sale, and sale
of future labor to create product that doesn't yet exist. At the
moment, I'm in the latter category, having my labor available if
anyone wants something new created. I can't afford to spend a lot
of effort building something custom for a non-existant customer in
the hopes I can someday find somebody to buy it from me as-is. I'll
stick to offering my services for future products, plus NewEco
which is a framework for lubricating the process of hiring people
even if you don't have any money in advance to pay them, providing
you have your own *labor* to put in lieu of money.
> - which clearly you don't.
Actually there is a lot of software I've already written, but I
don't know any way to find people who would like to buy it, so it
would be a waste of my time and energy to fret over selling it to
somebody.
For example, perhaps you know somebody who would like to purchase
my spam-filtering+reporting system, which runs in CMUCL, which
detects new e-mail that's arrived, automatically scans it to see
whether it's spam or not, asks user for confirmation if not sure,
if not spam then bleeps user's terminal with summary of it, if spam
then checks if it already knows where to complain about it, if not
automatically checks WHOIS server to get complaint addresses,
automatically verifies any address not previously verified, if no
valid address then goes upstream to complain there instead, and at
long last when at least one appropriate spam-complaint address is
known it builds a formal complaint letter and e-mails it
automatically to the known-working spam-complaint address. In the
process of all this, it maintains a local database of known
verified spam-complaint addresses for all CIDRs which have ever
sent spam here, and also maintains a local database of traceroute
information, where any particular item is re-computed whenever
needed but several weeks out of date, and it maintains a white-list
of penpals and other correspondents who are not sending spam.
> So you're an unemployed genius doesn't have anything that anyone
> is willing to pay for.
I have no idea. I don't know how to find *everyone* in the whole
world who would like to purchase either my already-completed
software or my services to produce new software. I have no money to
purchase prime-time advertisements on television networks, much
less SuperBowl ads.
> So you're trying to get people to work for free
Nope. I offer equal exchange of labor-time.
You must have already spent at least two minutes to compose each of
the five nasty messages you've posted to attack me. If you had
spent those same ten minutes working for NewEco, you'd have ten
minutes of labor credits. As it is now, you have nada for all your
wasted time.
> for the promise of some "labor credits" you don't have and can't
> be sure of supplying.
http://TinyURL.Com/Portl1 (the portal for NewEco) already provides
labor credits, already supplied, as of several weeks ago, actually
a couple months ago. You could *already* have labor credits, if you
had connected to Portl1 and created an account and answered a
ten-second Turing question, or two 5-second Turing questions, or a
4-second and a 6-second Turing question, then you'd already have
the 5 seconds of labor creduts you get when you create a new
account, plus the extra ten seconds of labor credits for the Turing
questions, a total of fifteen seconds of labor credits. You could
*really* have them already, if you didn't squander your time
attacking me. Or you could have them later today if you apply for a
new account right after you see this article.
Now the trick is what to *spend* those credits on. Currently a few
milliseconds of credit are taken as overhead for each PHP
script-run, but I don't have any *actual* services you can
purchase. But as soon as surveys/polls are implemented you'll be
able to invest some of your labor-credits to influence the outcome
of the surveys/polls, in particular you'll be able to influence
what direction NewEco takes, what new features (after
surveys/polls) you'd like me to implement for you to pay (labor
credits) to use/enjoy.
So I suggest you encourage me to get surveys/polls implemented, in
particlar right now you should look at http://TinyURL.Com/EcoSur
and offer help in cleaning up any flaws in the design if you can
find any, or if you like the design then please write a proposed
set of SQL statements to create those three tables, so I can review
your work instead of you reviewing mine, to speed up the final
design process.
Then, after it's implemented, you invest your time not in attacking
me in newsgroups but in voting (with your labor-time) for which new
features you'd like installed in NewEco, both ways that you can
spend your labor credits to get services you'd really like to get,
and ways that you can work to earn credits *other* than passing the
Turing questions I have pre-loaded. Why don't you take a look at
the proposed new services that I've posted for months that I'd
*like* to implement if anybody shows interest, pick something that
interests you, and then nominate that as an item in the "what to
implement" survey/poll, and then vote for that item with your
Turing-earned labor credits? If you're the only person voting, you
can dominate the result of the vote, hence almost completely
control what I do with NewEco. And even if somebody else votes for
something else, dilluting your control over the direction of
NewEco, you're such a eager beaver to destroy NewEco that surely
you can muster enough labor-time to overwealm their vote and
re-take control over the future direction of NewEco. Your vote in
NewEco's survey/poll will have a lot more effect than your
newsgroup rants.
> Why would I need someone else's labor?
For the same reason you buy most/all of your food at a grocery
store instead of running your own private farm without the benefit
of any public-supplied irrigation or private-supplied livestock
feed or fertilizer etc., and for the same reason you bought your
computer at a store instead if re-inventing computers and silicon
wafer technology and trying to design all that technology from
scratch and build your own silicon mining in your back yard plus
all the refining and manufacturing etc. You can't do *everything*
you need all by yourself without help from other people to provide
you with things you can't provide yourself. Just look at how you
rely on the InterNet, paying your Internet Service Provider, to let
you post to newsgroups. Just try to, all by yourself, without the
help of the InterNet, to somehow manage ot physically present your
rants into every personal computer of anyone who follows this
newsgroup. There's just no way you could post here all by yourself
without the help of others to set up the infrastructure plus your
ISP to provide specific access (and charge you for that service).
Everything you purchase, from food or utilities or InterNet access,
involves paying part of that cost as somebody's labor. In fact,
what you pay really goes only two places:
- Labor involved along the pipeline from mining/farming to product;
- Royalties on mining/land interests and patents and financial investments.
Of the two, labor is the majority of the cost in virtually anything
you purchase or lease.
> Are you going to remodel my house for me, for instance?
No, I don't have that particular skill. But perhaps eventually some
"networking" service such as LinkII whichI set up in NewEco will
facilitate your locating somebody in your local area who is willing
to remodel your house without needing $cash$, content to receive
labor credits in lieu of cash. Oh wait, you have $$cash$$ burning
holes in your pockets, right? So if you want your house remodeled,
why haven't you *already* hired a commercial contractor to do it
for you? Why are you asking me now instead of having already gotten
it done?
> Oh, I almost forgot. You really don't have any "labor credits"
You're wrong. You could have gotten up to 15 seconds total of them
already, or you can later today after you read this article.
> let's see the cash.
I don't have any cash. Why do you keep asking me for something I
don't have? Do you always waste your time trying to pursuade
tomatoes to provide blood? If you want cash, talk to somebody who
has cash, like yourself, ask yourself to pay you cash. You can
probably pay yourself a million dollars cash if you break it up
into chunks of reasonable size.
> Oh, I forgot. You're not actually paying anyone anything.
I'm not paying $cash$, but I'm paying labor credits. Up to 15
seconds total for new-account bonus plus answering simple
missing-word Turing questions.
> You are not a charity, recognized or not.
I'm better than a charity, because instead of putting people "on
the dole", disrespecting them, giving them benefits just because I
feel sorry for their plight, but treating them as worthless, as
having nothing of value in return:
http://twitter.com/CalRobert/status/5320792951
http://twitter.com/CalRobert/status/5320802828
I treat people with respect, offering them a way to *earn* my
services, telling them that they have something of value to do for
me in return for what I do for them, so they don't feel like
they're "on the dole", worthless charity cases.
> I wouldn't work for you for money, either. And if I did, it
> would be cash in advance.
Look who is planning to commit fraud there. You get cash, then you
skip town instead of providing the services the person paid for.
I never ask for cash in advance. I only ask for a few seconds of
labor in advance, then the resultant labor credits are immediately
redeemable for services.
> promises which probably will not be kept.
Want to make a wager on that? Here's what you do:
-1- Encourage me to get surveys/polls implemented.
-2- Open an account on NewEco/Portl1, giving you 5 free seconds of
labor credit.
-3- Earn some labor credits, up to 15 seconds total at any one time.
-4- Spend some labor credits to nominate http://TinyURL.Com/TruFut
(see in particular the section titled "When accusations against
somebody are flying around a newsgroup")
as a service to install in NewEco.
-5- Spend your labor credits to vote your preference for that feature.
-6- Repeat 3,5 as many times as you want to push TruFut to the top
of my priorites and get it implemented ASAP.
-7- Post as a claim what you said in the newsgroup, that my
promises won't be kept.
-8- Invest your labor credits in escroll promising to buy shares at
higher and higher prices to force the truth-value of your
claim as high as you want.
-9- If anybody is willing to sell-short at your price to negate
your influence on the price, increase your investment in
standing buy offers to restore market confidence in your high
estimate of the truth of your claim.
> Minimum wage? I haven't gotten minimum wage since the 1960's.
I haven't *ever* gotten minimum wage. My first regular paying job
(casual computer-programming on IBM 1620, in 1969) was $2/hr when
minimum wage was $1.65/hr. My second regular paying job was for
Round Table Pizza, $1.75/hr. My third regular paying job was for
Stanford Artificial Intelligence project/lab, for $7/hour, a huge
pay raise from Round Table. My pay never went below $7/hr after
that, except when I was unemployed so it was zero, like for most of
the past 18 years. At this point I'd be glad to get minimum wage
for Lisp or PHP, or even Java, programming. For C programming,
which is such a pain, I'd need more money, just to pay me for the
stress I'd suffer dealing with that crappy language.
NewEco is promarily for people who are unemployed, who can't find
anyone to pay them even minimum wage. For people like you who have
lots of money, I'll eventually offer a $cash$ mode of payment for
services. You work one hour for your regular job, earn $50 for that
one hour, lose $18 in taxes, take home $32, and pay $32 to NewEco,
which buys you four hours of minimum-wage labor, so your one hour
of high-pay work exchanges for four hours of my labor or the labor
of my other users. (I made up those numbers so that division by $8
would come out even. If your pay rate or tax schedule is different,
feel free to post more accurate detailed dollar figures.)
> If your project is worth it, then you can raise the money.
How would you suggest I find somebody willing to invest $money$,
not just time, in NewEco?
> You're a genius, I'm sure you can get a loan.
Only if you provide me with the information I need. Genius just
means that with adequate information I can figure out the solution
to the problem. But without the needed information, an IQ of ten
thousand wouldn't be able solve the problem.
Once thing which I do have, however, partly because of my
particular kind of inventive genius, is a meta-solution. One of the
features planned for NewEco will be micro-term contract work. I, or
another user with enough labor-credits in his/her account, posts a
request for services, in this case information of anyone willing to
provide my company (Maas Wireless Web Services, as recognized by
Capital One and Chase already) with a loan. Anybody who has such
information, provides it to me, and gets paid for the information,
providing that the information has been verified as true.
> Or find a venture capitalist willing to invest.
Same there. If you know any such that would be willing/eager to
invest in NewEco, tell me now, or wait until NewEco + contracts is
running so that you can get paid (labor credits) for your
information.
> Then I suggest you get a real job.
How would you propose I do that?
> >> OK, genius, then you should have no problem designing the
> >> database and writing the code yourself.
> > I only started writing PHP/MySQL code a few months ago. Although I
> > am very bright, still I realize that my very first attempts no
> > matter how brilliant might possibly benefit from a second bright
> > mind helping me with the design. ...
> But for a genius like you, it should be so easy.
It's easy to make a preliminary design that might have serious
flaws to be discovered later, but it's much easier to get it right
if I get others to review my design before I commit it to
implementation.
In your company, do you make *every* tiny decision yourself, with
no feedback whatsoever from any of your co-owners or co-workers or
employees etc.? Or do you sometimes ask somebody around you to give
you a critique of a major idea *before* you commit major company
resources to implement your new idea?
> And if it's that big and will be that successful, then you should be
> easily able to locate funds to help yo9u.
How? AFAIK Google doesn't provide any search engine where I can
type in "request funding for building a new economic system based
on human labor instead of national currency as the unit of
exchange, see details in http://TinyURL.Com/NewEco" and get back a
list of offers from venture capitalists and "angels" which I can
choose from.
> > I agree a lot of the *other* types of questions on IQ tests require
> > more the ability to psyche out the test itself rather than
> > demonstrate true thinking ability. So that's where you're half right.
> Nope, the same is true on the Mensa test.
Maybe I didn't make myself clear: On the *Mensa* tests themselves,
especially the California/Stanford-whatever test which was the
first of the two tests I took, the one which did *not* have those
five-missing-words-in-paragraph questions, lots o questions were of
that "test-taking-skills" rather than "true-intelligence" type.
So you actually are agreeing with me, and "nope" there is inappropriate.
Jerry Stuckle
>> I said you are looking for free help.
>
> And that was not correct. I'm looking to trade help. I help my
> users, they help me.
>
And what do you have which will help them? Nothing.
>> Which is exactly what you want.
>
> Nope, you're wrong again.
>
Nope. I'm right.
>> And let's see your reserve of that labor.
>
> If you can use some extra labor, I'm available for the kinds of
> stuff I can do, and eventually when I have lots of users their
> labor will be available too. So if you can use some help, say what
> kind of help you can use. If you can't use any help, then NewEco is
> of no use to you personally, and so your incessant posting on this
> topic is a waste of your time and energy.
>
You didn't answer my question. What is your reserve of labor?
>> Oh, wait. You don't have one, do you?
>
> I do. You are wrong again.
>
And what is your reserve of labor?
>> So you're making promises you can't keep.
>
> You are wrong again.
>
You haven't shown you can keep your promises.
>> The legal definition of that is FRAUD.
>
> Even if your false claims were true, it wouldn't qualify as fraud
> because I'm not asking anyone for money. So you're doubly wrong,
> that your premise is wrong, and even your analysis from that wrong
> premise is wrong.
>
Fraud does not have to involve money. Check the law.
>> People have lots of money.
>
> Name one person who has lots of money and would like some
> computer-programming WebServer application done for them, and state
> what kind of application they'd like.
>
I don't seem to have problems finding work. Neither do several other
people I know. But they something worth paying for.
>> You just need to have something worth payinf for
>
> There's a difference between sale of already-created product, where
> I need to already have it fully created, ready for sale, and sale
> of future labor to create product that doesn't yet exist. At the
> moment, I'm in the latter category, having my labor available if
> anyone wants something new created. I can't afford to spend a lot
> of effort building something custom for a non-existant customer in
> the hopes I can someday find somebody to buy it from me as-is. I'll
> stick to offering my services for future products, plus NewEco
> which is a framework for lubricating the process of hiring people
> even if you don't have any money in advance to pay them, providing
> you have your own *labor* to put in lieu of money.
>
True. Sale of an already-created product means people get something for
their investment. "Sale" of something in the future you don't have is
fraud.
>> - which clearly you don't.
>
> Actually there is a lot of software I've already written, but I
> don't know any way to find people who would like to buy it, so it
> would be a waste of my time and energy to fret over selling it to
> somebody.
>
If it were worth selling, you should be able to find someone willing to
buy it. After all, you claimed you were a genius.
> For example, perhaps you know somebody who would like to purchase
> my spam-filtering+reporting system, which runs in CMUCL, which
> detects new e-mail that's arrived, automatically scans it to see
> whether it's spam or not, asks user for confirmation if not sure,
> if not spam then bleeps user's terminal with summary of it, if spam
> then checks if it already knows where to complain about it, if not
> automatically checks WHOIS server to get complaint addresses,
> automatically verifies any address not previously verified, if no
> valid address then goes upstream to complain there instead, and at
> long last when at least one appropriate spam-complaint address is
> known it builds a formal complaint letter and e-mails it
> automatically to the known-working spam-complaint address. In the
> process of all this, it maintains a local database of known
> verified spam-complaint addresses for all CIDRs which have ever
> sent spam here, and also maintains a local database of traceroute
> information, where any particular item is re-computed whenever
> needed but several weeks out of date, and it maintains a white-list
> of penpals and other correspondents who are not sending spam.
>
If it's worth buying, you should be able to find someone willing to buy
it. I'm not your salesman.
>> So you're an unemployed genius doesn't have anything that anyone
>> is willing to pay for.
>
> I have no idea. I don't know how to find *everyone* in the whole
> world who would like to purchase either my already-completed
> software or my services to produce new software. I have no money to
> purchase prime-time advertisements on television networks, much
> less SuperBowl ads.
>
You don't need to fine *everyone*. You only need to find *some*.
>> So you're trying to get people to work for free
>
> Nope. I offer equal exchange of labor-time.
>
And what makes you think your time is worth the same amount as mine - or
anyone else's?
> You must have already spent at least two minutes to compose each of
> the five nasty messages you've posted to attack me. If you had
> spent those same ten minutes working for NewEco, you'd have ten
> minutes of labor credits. As it is now, you have nada for all your
> wasted time.
>
Which would be worth absolutely nothing.
>> for the promise of some "labor credits" you don't have and can't
>> be sure of supplying.
>
> http://TinyURL.Com/Portl1 (the portal for NewEco) already provides
> labor credits, already supplied, as of several weeks ago, actually
> a couple months ago. You could *already* have labor credits, if you
> had connected to Portl1 and created an account and answered a
> ten-second Turing question, or two 5-second Turing questions, or a
> 4-second and a 6-second Turing question, then you'd already have
> the 5 seconds of labor creduts you get when you create a new
> account, plus the extra ten seconds of labor credits for the Turing
> questions, a total of fifteen seconds of labor credits. You could
> *really* have them already, if you didn't squander your time
> attacking me. Or you could have them later today if you apply for a
> new account right after you see this article.
>
Let's see. I get 10 minutes of labor credits. To use those credits, I
need to put what I want in writing, find someone willing to do it, vet
them to ensure they are qualified to do the work to my specifications,
monitor their work to see it is completed properly and on time, then
checking their final code to ensure it does what I need.
Or, I can spend 10 minutes and do it myself.
> Now the trick is what to *spend* those credits on. Currently a few
> milliseconds of credit are taken as overhead for each PHP
> script-run, but I don't have any *actual* services you can
> purchase. But as soon as surveys/polls are implemented you'll be
> able to invest some of your labor-credits to influence the outcome
> of the surveys/polls, in particular you'll be able to influence
> what direction NewEco takes, what new features (after
> surveys/polls) you'd like me to implement for you to pay (labor
> credits) to use/enjoy.
>
So you admit you have nothing to sell. But *maybe* you'll have some in
the future.
> So I suggest you encourage me to get surveys/polls implemented, in
> particlar right now you should look at http://TinyURL.Com/EcoSur
> and offer help in cleaning up any flaws in the design if you can
> find any, or if you like the design then please write a proposed
> set of SQL statements to create those three tables, so I can review
> your work instead of you reviewing mine, to speed up the final
> design process.
>
Nope. I don't work for free. And as I said before, I wouldn't work for
you if you paid me.
> Then, after it's implemented, you invest your time not in attacking
> me in newsgroups but in voting (with your labor-time) for which new
> features you'd like installed in NewEco, both ways that you can
> spend your labor credits to get services you'd really like to get,
> and ways that you can work to earn credits *other* than passing the
> Turing questions I have pre-loaded. Why don't you take a look at
> the proposed new services that I've posted for months that I'd
> *like* to implement if anybody shows interest, pick something that
> interests you, and then nominate that as an item in the "what to
> implement" survey/poll, and then vote for that item with your
> Turing-earned labor credits? If you're the only person voting, you
> can dominate the result of the vote, hence almost completely
> control what I do with NewEco. And even if somebody else votes for
> something else, dilluting your control over the direction of
> NewEco, you're such a eager beaver to destroy NewEco that surely
> you can muster enough labor-time to overwealm their vote and
> re-take control over the future direction of NewEco. Your vote in
> NewEco's survey/poll will have a lot more effect than your
> newsgroup rants.
>
I have looked at your proposed new service. I've seen better from high
school kids.
>> Why would I need someone else's labor?
>
> For the same reason you buy most/all of your food at a grocery
> store instead of running your own private farm without the benefit
> of any public-supplied irrigation or private-supplied livestock
> feed or fertilizer etc., and for the same reason you bought your
> computer at a store instead if re-inventing computers and silicon
> wafer technology and trying to design all that technology from
> scratch and build your own silicon mining in your back yard plus
> all the refining and manufacturing etc. You can't do *everything*
> you need all by yourself without help from other people to provide
> you with things you can't provide yourself. Just look at how you
> rely on the InterNet, paying your Internet Service Provider, to let
> you post to newsgroups. Just try to, all by yourself, without the
> help of the InterNet, to somehow manage ot physically present your
> rants into every personal computer of anyone who follows this
> newsgroup. There's just no way you could post here all by yourself
> without the help of others to set up the infrastructure plus your
> ISP to provide specific access (and charge you for that service).
>
That is nowhere near equivalent. Your entire argument is fallacious. I
would expect better from a claimed genius.
> Everything you purchase, from food or utilities or InterNet access,
> involves paying part of that cost as somebody's labor. In fact,
> what you pay really goes only two places:
> - Labor involved along the pipeline from mining/farming to product;
> - Royalties on mining/land interests and patents and financial investments.
> Of the two, labor is the majority of the cost in virtually anything
> you purchase or lease.
>
>> Are you going to remodel my house for me, for instance?
>
> No, I don't have that particular skill. But perhaps eventually some
> "networking" service such as LinkII whichI set up in NewEco will
> facilitate your locating somebody in your local area who is willing
> to remodel your house without needing $cash$, content to receive
> labor credits in lieu of cash. Oh wait, you have $$cash$$ burning
> holes in your pockets, right? So if you want your house remodeled,
> why haven't you *already* hired a commercial contractor to do it
> for you? Why are you asking me now instead of having already gotten
> it done?
>
So you are of no use to me. And as a programmer, you also are of no use
to me. It would take me less time to do it myself in the first place.
>> Oh, I almost forgot. You really don't have any "labor credits"
>
> You're wrong. You could have gotten up to 15 seconds total of them
> already, or you can later today after you read this article.
>
Which is worth absolutely nothing to me.
>> let's see the cash.
>
> I don't have any cash. Why do you keep asking me for something I
> don't have? Do you always waste your time trying to pursuade
> tomatoes to provide blood? If you want cash, talk to somebody who
> has cash, like yourself, ask yourself to pay you cash. You can
> probably pay yourself a million dollars cash if you break it up
> into chunks of reasonable size.
>
So we're back to the fact you're looking for free labor.
>> Oh, I forgot. You're not actually paying anyone anything.
>
> I'm not paying $cash$, but I'm paying labor credits. Up to 15
> seconds total for new-account bonus plus answering simple
> missing-word Turing questions.
>
Which are worth nothing.
>> You are not a charity, recognized or not.
>
> I'm better than a charity, because instead of putting people "on
> the dole", disrespecting them, giving them benefits just because I
> feel sorry for their plight, but treating them as worthless, as
> having nothing of value in return:
> http://twitter.com/CalRobert/status/5320792951
> http://twitter.com/CalRobert/status/5320802828
> I treat people with respect, offering them a way to *earn* my
> services, telling them that they have something of value to do for
> me in return for what I do for them, so they don't feel like
> they're "on the dole", worthless charity cases.
>
No, you are worse than a charity - and worse than a legitimate business.
>> I wouldn't work for you for money, either. And if I did, it
>> would be cash in advance.
>
> Look who is planning to commit fraud there. You get cash, then you
> skip town instead of providing the services the person paid for.
>
Never done it, and never will. Prove that I would skip town.
> I never ask for cash in advance. I only ask for a few seconds of
> labor in advance, then the resultant labor credits are immediately
> redeemable for services.
>
Which will be worthless.
>> promises which probably will not be kept.
>
> Want to make a wager on that? Here's what you do:
> -1- Encourage me to get surveys/polls implemented.
> -2- Open an account on NewEco/Portl1, giving you 5 free seconds of
> labor credit.
> -3- Earn some labor credits, up to 15 seconds total at any one time.
> -4- Spend some labor credits to nominate http://TinyURL.Com/TruFut
> (see in particular the section titled "When accusations against
> somebody are flying around a newsgroup")
> as a service to install in NewEco.
> -5- Spend your labor credits to vote your preference for that feature.
> -6- Repeat 3,5 as many times as you want to push TruFut to the top
> of my priorites and get it implemented ASAP.
> -7- Post as a claim what you said in the newsgroup, that my
> promises won't be kept.
> -8- Invest your labor credits in escroll promising to buy shares at
> higher and higher prices to force the truth-value of your
> claim as high as you want.
> -9- If anybody is willing to sell-short at your price to negate
> your influence on the price, increase your investment in
> standing buy offers to restore market confidence in your high
> estimate of the truth of your claim.
>
Here's an idea. Do what I do. When I need help, I PAY for it. Hard
cash. Your "labor credits" are worthless - as already pointed out.
>> Minimum wage? I haven't gotten minimum wage since the 1960's.
>
> I haven't *ever* gotten minimum wage. My first regular paying job
> (casual computer-programming on IBM 1620, in 1969) was $2/hr when
> minimum wage was $1.65/hr. My second regular paying job was for
> Round Table Pizza, $1.75/hr. My third regular paying job was for
> Stanford Artificial Intelligence project/lab, for $7/hour, a huge
> pay raise from Round Table. My pay never went below $7/hr after
> that, except when I was unemployed so it was zero, like for most of
> the past 18 years. At this point I'd be glad to get minimum wage
> for Lisp or PHP, or even Java, programming. For C programming,
> which is such a pain, I'd need more money, just to pay me for the
> stress I'd suffer dealing with that crappy language.
>
> NewEco is promarily for people who are unemployed, who can't find
> anyone to pay them even minimum wage. For people like you who have
> lots of money, I'll eventually offer a $cash$ mode of payment for
> services. You work one hour for your regular job, earn $50 for that
> one hour, lose $18 in taxes, take home $32, and pay $32 to NewEco,
> which buys you four hours of minimum-wage labor, so your one hour
> of high-pay work exchanges for four hours of my labor or the labor
> of my other users. (I made up those numbers so that division by $8
> would come out even. If your pay rate or tax schedule is different,
> feel free to post more accurate detailed dollar figures.)
>
And they are supposed to eat "labor credits"? ROFLMAO!
>> If your project is worth it, then you can raise the money.
>
> How would you suggest I find somebody willing to invest $money$,
> not just time, in NewEco?
>
You're a genius. Figure it out.
>> You're a genius, I'm sure you can get a loan.
>
> Only if you provide me with the information I need. Genius just
> means that with adequate information I can figure out the solution
> to the problem. But without the needed information, an IQ of ten
> thousand wouldn't be able solve the problem.
>
OK, you figure out the solution to the problem and get the financing.
> Once thing which I do have, however, partly because of my
> particular kind of inventive genius, is a meta-solution. One of the
> features planned for NewEco will be micro-term contract work. I, or
> another user with enough labor-credits in his/her account, posts a
> request for services, in this case information of anyone willing to
> provide my company (Maas Wireless Web Services, as recognized by
> Capital One and Chase already) with a loan. Anybody who has such
> information, provides it to me, and gets paid for the information,
> providing that the information has been verified as true.
>
ROFLMAO!
>> Or find a venture capitalist willing to invest.
>
> Same there. If you know any such that would be willing/eager to
> invest in NewEco, tell me now, or wait until NewEco + contracts is
> running so that you can get paid (labor credits) for your
> information.
>
In other words, you can't convince anyone else to invest in your scheme,
either.
>> Then I suggest you get a real job.
>
> How would you propose I do that?
>
You're a genius. Figure it out.
>>>> OK, genius, then you should have no problem designing the
>>>> database and writing the code yourself.
>>> I only started writing PHP/MySQL code a few months ago. Although I
>>> am very bright, still I realize that my very first attempts no
>>> matter how brilliant might possibly benefit from a second bright
>>> mind helping me with the design. ...
>> But for a genius like you, it should be so easy.
>
> It's easy to make a preliminary design that might have serious
> flaws to be discovered later, but it's much easier to get it right
> if I get others to review my design before I commit it to
> implementation.
>
> In your company, do you make *every* tiny decision yourself, with
> no feedback whatsoever from any of your co-owners or co-workers or
> employees etc.? Or do you sometimes ask somebody around you to give
> you a critique of a major idea *before* you commit major company
> resources to implement your new idea?
>
No, but then I am also paying people. Hard cash.
>> And if it's that big and will be that successful, then you should be
>> easily able to locate funds to help yo9u.
>
> How? AFAIK Google doesn't provide any search engine where I can
> type in "request funding for building a new economic system based
> on human labor instead of national currency as the unit of
> exchange, see details in http://TinyURL.Com/NewEco" and get back a
> list of offers from venture capitalists and "angels" which I can
> choose from.
>
No, I'm not going to do your work for you - especially for free. You
want to build a business, you need to learn how to run a business.
>>> I agree a lot of the *other* types of questions on IQ tests require
>>> more the ability to psyche out the test itself rather than
>>> demonstrate true thinking ability. So that's where you're half right.
>
>> Nope, the same is true on the Mensa test.
>
> Maybe I didn't make myself clear: On the *Mensa* tests themselves,
> especially the California/Stanford-whatever test which was the
> first of the two tests I took, the one which did *not* have those
> five-missing-words-in-paragraph questions, lots o questions were of
> that "test-taking-skills" rather than "true-intelligence" type.
>
> So you actually are agreeing with me, and "nope" there is inappropriate.
Oh, you made yourself clear, all right. And my statement stands.
The bottom line is - you have no idea how to run a business. You're
looking for free help. In return, you promise future "labor credits"
which are worthless.
I suggest you get a real job.
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
REM> And that was not correct. I'm looking to trade help. I help my
REM> users, they help me.
> From: Jerry Stuckle <jstuck...@attglobal.net>
> And what do you have which will help them? Nothing.
So-far I have just the essential accounting framework to require
some tiny amount of human labor on a continuing basis to allow
usage, which is basically for the purpose of preventing spambots
from making millions of expensive service requests without any
human intervention. Next I'm working on the first actual feature,
namely surveys/polls, so that users can vote for what other
features they would like me to implement. So at present it's too
early to get an answer to the question of what I *will* have to
help my users. But I have a large set of ideas of what might
benefit my users. Have you looked at it yet? Have you looked
through all the proposed services I might provide and found
*nothing* that you believe *anyone* (except myself) could ever
benefit from? In case it's been a while since you last looked at
it, and you are too dumb to find the link to it, I'll show you
where to find it. Start at http://TinyURL.Com/NewEco and follow
this link:
Linkname: larger index
URL: http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/WAP/projectIdeas.html
So tell me whether IYO there is *nothing* proposed there which
could possibly ever be of use to anyone except myself.
> You didn't answer my question. What is your reserve of labor?
Right now, it's myself, specifically my ability to write software
rapidly. After I get past the bootstrapping stage, where my users
will be able to get benefit from the first of my services, but
they'll need to perform labor from time to time to qualify for
large amounts of my services, then my labor reserve will include
all those happy users willing to trade their labors for my
services.
Yesterday I was thinking about the chicken-and-egg problem that
users don't want to pay for services until they've had a free trial
to realize the services are actually valuable to them but I can't
give a free trial because spammers will flood the system with
spurious service requests and harvest all my useful data and
re-sell it to others at a profit and crash my system etc. But then
I realized how my current accounting framework is sufficient to
solve this problem:
- Users get a sorta free trial providing they are willing to answer
randomly-selected Turing questions from time to time, which
prevents spambotnets from swamping the system and harvesting all
the useful content.
- There are only a little over a hundred Turing questions, ranging
from 4 to 10 seconds of credit each, totalling appx. 800 seconds
of credit, so the free trial essentially ends at that point. All
the customization that each user has set up to provide a
personal experience, such as finding job ads that do *not*
require any skills that user doesn't have, will be lost unless
the user stops answering Turing questions and starts doing work
that is truly useful to me or others on the system. Thus each
user must decide, before the appx. 800 seconds of free-trial
script-run time (appx 10-100 script-runs per second hence a few
tens of thousands of script-runs total) are exhausted, whether
any of the services are worth enough to do some *actual* labor
in return.
- Some services require a significant chunk of labor-time in the
user's main account, but the user isn't allowed to use Turing
questions to exceed 15 seconds in the main account. But the user
can make small deposits into surveys/polls, again and again,
using Turing questions to obtain the funds, building up the
total investment (deposit) in surveys/polls far beyond the
15-second Turing limit, then suddenly withdraw enough at one
time back into the user's main account to qualify for the
services that require a minimum account balance greater than 15
seconds.
- Since spammers are unlikely to bother setting up the complicated
scripts that would be needed to alternately answer
randomly-selected Turing questions and transfer the funds from
the main account to surveys/polls, then upon getting enough
total deposit, withdraw it all back to the main account and use
it to make high-balance-required service requests, this strategy
effectively locks spambotnets out of all the major (expensive to
run) services.
- Meanwhile, non-spammers, having tried all the services for free
(except for the time required to answer some of the Turing
questions, a relatively trivial amount of time, such as ten
seconds to answer one question which grants 10,000 milliseconds
of server time hence a hundred to a thousand individual service
requests, which should satisfy the user for an hour or so),
ought to by now (when Turing questions are nearly exhausted)
have found *some* service which is **really** worth using, at
which point they will be *willing* to start performing some
useful labor in exchange for services.
Thus I seem to have a graceful way to start with sorta-free trial
of my provided services and convert towards labor exchange for
continued use of services.
JS> So you're making promises you can't keep.
REM> You are wrong again.
> You haven't shown you can keep your promises.
My currently-effective promise is that if you fill out the
new-account form you can get a new account, and then you can log in
and check your account balance and answer Turing questions whenever
the balance is below 10 seconds and the smallest-value question
won't put your balance over 15 seconds. That promise is currently
being kept. How do you propose that I *show* that promise is being
kept if you never test my system to see whether the promise is kept
or not?
As soon as I finish implementing surveys/polls, I'll be able to
make a new promise: You will be able to invest your income from
Turing questions into whatever survey/poll question you wish among
those offered, specifically into whichever of the listed "answers"
you prefer for any particular question. For any given question you
will also be allowed to propose a new answer, which will be visible
*only* to you and the master account until such time as the master
account approves it (no obscene/abusive/illegal language allowed,
otherwise just about any survey question will be allowed). After
your new answer gets approved, then you'll be able to deposit funds
into that particular answer, as much as you can get from answering
Turing questions. In particular, the meta-survey question that
starts the whole process, "What survey question do you want?", will
allow you to propose entirely new survey/poll questions. As soon as
each is approved, the new question will be available for you (and
other users) to propose answers to that question, and then after
the answer is approved you'll be able to deposit funds into that
answer.
Give me a couple more weeks to get surveys/polls fully implemented.
If I succeed in said implementation, then you will be able to test
those promises about surveys/polls to see whether I am keeping them.
Now are there any *other* promises you feel I've made already yet
not demonstrated that I'm keeping?
Now some important matters regarding my network access and work on
surveys/polls: On Wednesday, Nov.04, late afternoon, early evening,
I got a call from the sysadmin of the ISP where I have my shell
account to inform me that the discontinuation of direct VT100
dialup service had finally occurred, that now PPP was the only way
to get into my shell account from home. Fortunately the day before
I had restored from SyQuest drive the four remaining PPP-related
files that I had deleted in 1998, and I had tried to run PPP and
found that it didn't FREEZE my Macintosh, and that it actually
dialed the local access number, but failed to perform a PPP login.
Also a week or so before that I had finally remembered the trick
for unBinHexing NiftyTelnet, namely don't use the BinHex program,
instead do it directly in Stuffit Expander 3.0.7, which doesn't
suffer from the large-file-CRC bug that the BinHex program suffers.
So while I was talking to the sysadmin over the phone, I explained
my status, and he talked me through making the needed changes to
PPP configuration so that it'd work. Basically I needed to include
r...@rawbw.com instead of just rem as the login name, and in TCP/IP
control panel I needed to manually enter the IP numbers of the two
Domain Name Servers used by tsoft/rawbw. Then I tried connecting
directly from the PPP config control panel, and this time it
successfully established PPP connection.
Next I tried to run NiftyTelnet for the first time ever, and it
couldn't find the modem to respond "OK" to a D.C.Hayes command,
because the modem was already **online** via the PPP configuration
control panel. So I had to terminate the PPP connection, and then
try NiftyTelnet again, and this time it succeeded, gave me shell
login prompt, I entered rem and password, and for the first time
ever I was logged into a shell account via PPP.
NiftyTelnet too some getting used to, and I was already exhausted
by this time, so I burned the rest of Wednesday.
But Thursday I started using NiftyTelnet + PPP to do actual useful
work, specifically I started to do major work towards implementing
surveys/polls in NewEco. By Thurdsay bedtime I had finished the
main part of the code for proposing a new answer to the toplevel
meta-survey question. See near the end of http://TinyURL.Com/EcoSur
for that progress report, including sample output. During that
work, developing the code, I created several copies of database
records, where for consistency there should be only one. Rather
than write code to manualy delete the extra records, Friday I
started to write an audit program, runnable only from the master
account, to allow me to browse the duplicate answers that a single
user proposed to a single question and delete all but one of them.
See the very last part of http://TinyURL.Com/EcoSur for report of
progress on that task so-far by midnight tonight. I estimate I'm
about half-finished with the audit program, so I should have it
finished over the weekend, then I'll be able to get back to work on
code for the ordinary-user to propose new answers to existing
survey questions. By the middle of next week I hope to have a first
draft of surveys/polls basically working.
Now I want to ask an important question to all the software
experts, especially IT-department managers, reading this
thread/article: Looking at my progress on implementing
surveys/polls on Thursday, and my progress on the master audit
program on Friday, does it look like I'm about "par" regarding
speed of designing new software from scratch and getting it
working, or does it seem like I'm faster or slower than the average
software engineer at such tasks? Note this is all PHP/MySQL,
running on a remote hosting service, so every time I finish editing
the PHP source on my Unix shell account I need to FTP it from my
shell account to the hosting service then switch over to lynx and
re-load the Web page to re-execute the newly-edited code. This FTP
step slows down the process compared to running PHP/MySQL directly
on my shell account. So given that extra step every time I want to
test the code I changed, is my progress slow or fast or about
average? If I were getting paid for this rate of production of
working PHP/MySQL code from scratch, assuming I was implementing an
application that my employer had asked me to write, or I was
implementing something I thought of myself that my employer liked
and wanted to see implemented about how many dollars per hour would
I be worth to my employer?
Jerry Stuckle
<snipped a hole bunch of scam>
The bottom line is - you have nothing. You seem to think a doctor's
time is worth the same as a burger flippers - or that all programmer's
time is worth the same. It isn't, by far.
You, with your great intelligence, can't seem to find a job, so you're
trying to get people to work for you for free. You make promises you
can't keep (which falls under the legal definition of fraud) and even
here are trying to get people to do your work for you.
And as for the rest of your stuff - you aren't even smart enough to
understand that these are NOT PHP questions - and are off topic in this
newsgroup. Sure, you're using PHP for your project - but that does not
automatically mean those are PHP question.
You're really desperate for help. How much have you gotten so far? I
doubt anything - and you won't, because you can't even seem to
understand what's off topic.
Get a job. Even you can flip burgers at the local diner or fast food
restaurant.
Erick T. Barkhuis
>Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t wrote:
>
><snipped a hole bunch of scam>
[...]
>And as for the rest of your stuff - you aren't even smart enough to
>understand that these are NOT PHP questions - and are off topic in
>this newsgroup.
What newsgroup would that be, Jerry?
--
Erick
Gordon Burditt
>
>No, I don't have that particular skill. But perhaps eventually some
>"networking" service such as LinkII whichI set up in NewEco will
>facilitate your locating somebody in your local area who is willing
>to remodel your house without needing $cash$, content to receive
>labor credits in lieu of cash.
One problem I have here is: Why should someone trust labor credits
on your site as opposed to other forms of currency, like Bernie
Madoff investments, Enron stock, promises of future benefits from
the Social Security system, S&H Green Stamps (anyone remember those?),
airline miles, or 1 contest entry in the Publisher's Clearinghouse
Sweepstakes? I'm not saying these are all total scams but they are
considerably less liquid than cash and they might go bad at any time.
Your current setup involving seconds of labor, Turing tests, and
biasing surveys is a toy application that nobody, including tax
authorities, will take seriously. I'm worried about what happens
when it involves real-world labor in quantities of hours, weeks,
and months, and when unemployed people can actually earn a living
(that means, at a minimum, some way to buy food and pay rent) with
labor credits.
What prevents you from issuing a lot of labor credits in exchange
for web design on your site, a new car, and dental services, in
exchange for promises that those credits would be redeemable in the
future? Then you disappear (or declare bankruptcy), and no one
else will accept the labor credits, so your suppliers are left
holding worthless credits. Many scams like this (often with stock)
have been pulled off before. It's this problem that make people
what backs up labor credits or any other kind of currency someone
issues.
If you do real labor bartering (this means in quantities like hours,
weeks, and months, not seconds) and most of it between your users
and your users, not with you as a party, then you have to deal with
the tax laws. Two people who barter their own labor each have
taxable income of the fair market value of the other person's labor
they received. (This isn't like bartering objects where selling
an old item for less than you paid for it new involves no tax.) An
intermediate organization (you) who acts as a go-between needs to
do tax reporting in this situation. Is your 1099-B form generator
software ready yet? When you get to the point of bartering labor
in real amounts I hope your accounting and tax reporting software
is ready.
A somewhat-related problem is that all labor is not worth the same.
An hour of babysitting is not worth the same as an hour of heart
surgery or an hour of web design.
Hopefully you find people who do web design services in exchange
for credits, people who do house remodeling in exchange for credits,
and people who do dental work in exchange for credits, but this
requires that people need to be able to trust that credits they get
now will be worth something in the future. Now, when I go to trade
a month's worth of web design and intend to later spend those credits
on, say, house remodeling, I need some assurance that those credits
won't go *POOF* before I've earned enough to do the whole house and
I'll have wasted a month's worth of labor.
>I'm not paying $cash$, but I'm paying labor credits. Up to 15
When you get labor bartering up for real, what prevents you from
buying huge amounts of goods and services (not worried about piddling
15 seconds of labor here: more worried about years) including a
South American vacation, and then you don't come back, and all the
stuff is gone somewhere. Even if you aren't a crook, people will
believe you *MIGHT* be. There's plenty of scammers out there.
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> Fraud does not have to involve money. Check the law.
AFAIK it has to involves obtaining money or valuable services or
products from somebody, on promise of something of comparable value
in return, with deliberate intent to *not* keep that second half of
the deal. Since nothing of the sort is occurring in regard to
NewEco, you are committing libel every time you accuse me of
committing fraud.
> I don't seem to have problems finding work.
That's because you already have a job. Just trying being unemployed
for 18 years then convincing somebody to put you back to (paying)
work.
> "Sale" of something in the future you don't have is fraud.
No, it's only fraud if you do not intend to create what they paid for.
> > Actually there is a lot of software I've already written, but I
> > don't know any way to find people who would like to buy it, so it
> > would be a waste of my time and energy to fret over selling it to
> > somebody.
> If it were worth selling, you should be able to find someone
> willing to buy it.
Not necessarily so. It's entirely possible to have something of
value but not know how to find somebody to buy it, at least not
immediately.
> If it's worth buying, you should be able to find someone willing
> to buy it.
Not necessarily. Creating something of value, and selling it, are
two entirely different skills.
> > I have no idea. I don't know how to find *everyone* in the whole
> > world who would like to purchase either my already-completed
> > software or my services to produce new software. I have no money to
> > purchase prime-time advertisements on television networks, much
> > less SuperBowl ads.
> You don't need to fine *everyone*. You only need to find *some*.
Correct, except that until I achieve an algorithm that finds
*everyone* fitting that criterion, there's no way to know whether I
haven't yet found somebody because I haven't yet exhausted the
search space or because the search space is empty. Only after I've
exhausted the search space, and still not found a successful
result, then I would finally know the search space was empty to
begin with.
Compare with SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Inteligence): We
have barely scratched the surface of ways to find where some ET
might be hiding in our own galaxy, much less all the other galaxies
in the Universe. So the fact we haven't *yet* found any ET is no
proof that no ET exists anywhere. Likewise I haven't hardly begun
to scratch the surface of asking each of 7 billion human beings
each of five thousand questions whether they would like this or
that software I wrote or might write in the near future, so I
haven't any reason to give up already, and you have no reason to
say not one person anywhere wants anything I ever wrote or ever
will write.
Perhaps you should contact Laura who runs the women's music program
on KKUP FM 91.5 on Sundays noonish, regarding an idea for use of
NewEco that she rather liked and is looking forward to
implementation.
> And what makes you think your time is worth the same amount as
> mine - or anyone else's?
For people who already/currently have jobs that pay more than
minimum wage, of course their time is allegedly worth more than
somebody who is currently unemployed, but that might be more of a
measurement bias than fact. My time might actually be worth much
more than yours is, but not yet be well recognized so that I could
get paid more than you are getting paid.
However for people who are currently unemployed, it's illegal to
hire them for less than the minumum wage, so it's entirely
reasonable to equate their payrates hypothetically if they can
perform a contract that was offered. So for the main class of
regular users I expect on my system, people currently unemployed,
wasting their time doing fruitless job-search activities, not
getting paid for anything they do, who could get paid (not $money$
but labor exchange) through my proposed system, it's entirely
reasonable to say that any who are able to complete a contract
through my system are worth the same hourly rate, while any who
can't do any contract are worth less or zero, and any who can get a
regular job that pays more than minimum wage are worth more.
But that's *total* time being measured. When we speak of marginal
time, even a well-employed person might be worth minimum wage per
marginal time. As yourself. Suppose you get $50/hr for the hours
you are allowed to work. But suppose you want to do extra hours, at
your own discretion, any time you feel like it. Will your employer
pay you $50/hr for however many extra hours you wish to work? Or
will your employer put a cap on your hours for which you get paid
that rate, and any more you gotta find some other place to get
paid, probably at only the legal minumum wage. In that case, your
*marginal* payrate is probably just minumum wage.
> > You must have already spent at least two minutes to compose each of
> > the five nasty messages you've posted to attack me. If you had
> > spent those same ten minutes working for NewEco, you'd have ten
> > minutes of labor credits. As it is now, you have nada for all your
> > wasted time.
> Which would be worth absolutely nothing.
How would you know? I bet you haven't even read my outline of
proposed services to provide via NewEco. There might be something
there you'd find very valuable, but you aren't aware of it, so you
think all the ideas are worth nothing, and you are wrong.
> Let's see. I get 10 minutes of labor credits. To use those credits, ...
No, actually you're not allowed to get that much. Because of IRS
regulations that all earnings over one dollar must be reported to
IRS, including proof of work-permit and employee ID number and
employer ID number, and the fact I have no funds to pay for all
that overhead, I limit all transactions to less than a dollar each,
which works out (at $8/hr minimum wage) to 7.5 minutes i.e. 450
seconds. To keep strictly under that dollar limit, and to keep all
contracts a multiple of 10 seconds so that the 10% penalty for
failure to complete a contract is also a whole number of seconds,
the longest a contract can be is 440 seconds, i.e. 7 min 20 sec. If
you have 10 minutes of credit, you can't spend it all at one time,
you have to break it into different contracts, with no single
contract over 440 seconds. Otherwise, continuing with your analysis
..
> I need to put what I want in writing,
Yes, if you mean computer writing, keystrokes of USASCII text. No
actual **writing** (on paper etc.) required.
> find someone willing to do it,
No, that's what the RFB is for. You post a Request For Bids, and
anyone who thinks they can do what you ask posts a bid, and the
lowest bid gets the job.
> vet them to ensure they are qualified to do the work to my
> specifications,
No. They say they can do the task, the clock starts, and if they
haven't submitted their work by the end of the time they don't get
paid.
> monitor their work to see it is completed properly and on time,
Mostly not correct. The computer keeps track of the clock. When
they are done, *then* you check what they submitted to decide
whether to pay immediately or dispute the quality of the work.
> then checking their final code to ensure it does what I need.
Yes, but you'd have to do that with *any* employeed. Only if you
set an employer in charge of their own sub-company, with its own
books and accounts payable/receivable and its own management
independent of yours, then it's up to that sub-company whether
it'll survive or go broke. But in all other cases, at some point
you have to, as manager, at least do a cursory check of what work
was submitted before you put it out on the market for customers to
destructively test.
> Or, I can spend 10 minutes and do it myself.
If you can do something in 440 seconds yourself, then you'd be
silly to hire somebody who says they can do it in 440 seconds. But
if somebody can do it in half the time that you'd require, and if
you have *lots* of such tasks, the little bits you save cutting 440
seconds down to 150 seconds for each can save you a lot of time.
But the main use for contracting out work is when you simply can't
do the job yourself in any reasonable amount of time, while
somebody else *can*, so you hire them to get it done in a few
minutes instead of spending weeks trying to figure out how you
could do the whole job yourself without any help.
You talk like your company (software-programming instruction: Java,
C++, etc.) has not a single employee, that you do *all* the work
yourself, answer phones yourself, take customer-support calls
yourself, and perform all the instruction yourself. The brag on
your Web site about all your instructors being professional is a
ploy, it's just you by yourself wearing all those hats at your
"company". You've never hired even one person because you insist on
doing all the work yourself instead of hiring others to increase
the total workflow.
I doubt you do the whole company yourself, but you talk like you
don't even have the concept of hiring anybody else to do something
for you, because you can do all tasks yourself as fast as anybody
can do them. I'm going to assume you *do* hire others, and are just
playing stupid asking why you'd ever hire somebody to do 440
seconds of work for you when you could do the same work yourself in
the same time.
NewEco would give you more flexibility in getting small tasks done,
the kind you don't want to assign to your regular employees because
it would distract them from concentration on their continuing
projects, break up their concentration and lower their efficiency.
Better that when you have five or ten very quick tasks you need
done, instead of interrupting five or ten of your employees to stop
what they are doing to do this quick task instead, better you post
five or ten RFBs on NewEco and within a few minutes five or ten
people have signed up to do those tasks, and a few minutes later
those five or ten people have completed those tasks, while your
regular employees haven't lost any of their trains-of-thought.
Of course you can't expect all those people available via NewEco in
the very short term. It will take a while to build up my user base.
> So you admit you have nothing to sell.
Actually I have a whole lot of completed and working software I
might sell if I knew how to contact potential buyers, plus a lot of
partially-completed software that needs further work, which I might
work on if I found somebody interested in working with me to
develop those products towards those customers' desires. For
example, I have prototypes of a methodology for computerized
teaching of "word problems" in mathematics: How to choose the
concepts to express in math, how to choose specific
parameters/variables/symbols to represent the numerical quantities,
how to translate the statements (facts) and the goal into
mathematical equations using those symbols, and how to recognize
when the set-up is done and you crank out the pure-math, and then
how to express the final answer back in the problem domain in
English. Now your company deals only with teaching how to write
computer software in various programming languages, not how to
solve math problems, so your company has no use for my prototype,
to develop into a product, but some *other* company in
education/training that deals more with math instead of software
might have a use for my technology.
Also I have fairly well developed flashcard drill, whereby somebody
can easily/efficiently memorize vocabulary/jargon, for example to
train as lawyer or legal assistant or doctor or nurse or medical
assistant or medical transcriptionist etc. Your company has no
interest in that, but some *other* company that dealt with some
field requiring memorizing lots of jargon might have a use for my
technology.
> I have looked at your proposed new service. I've seen better
> from high school kids.
Well, good, tell me the URL of what they have up&running, and I'll
compare their system with what I am building, and if their system
does everything mine will do but better then I won't need to build
mine, I'll just use theirs instead. Put up or shut up. Tell me the
URLs of each of the high-school-kids' better-than-NewEco systems,
or stop making up stories based on figments of your imagination.
Jerry Stuckle
<Snip the biggest bunch of bullshit I've seen on usenet in years>
You need to be talking to an attorney. There are so many red flags here
for fraud it isn't even funny.
But you won't have to worry about being arrested, because your idea is
worth exactly what people are willing to pay for it now - nothing.
Get a job. Even a genius like you should be able to flip burgers at the
local fast food restaurant.
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> One problem I have here is: Why should someone trust labor
> credits on your site as opposed to other forms of currency,
Because these labor credits are available any time you want to
spend a few minutes to earn them, unlike money which you can't just
**get** any time you want to work for it, you need to go to a lot
of trouble to get a *job* for somebody and then you're stuck at
that job until you quit or get fired or laid off, and while you
still have the job you basially have a fixed income. My system is
flexible, that you work for labor-credits whenever you think you
might need to spend them, then you try to spend them right after
you get them. Instead of buying something you can't currently
afford, on credit, and then spending the next 30 years paying off
the loan, or saving in a bank account for 30 years in the hopes
you'll still be alive and healthy and even want your big purchase
when you can finally afford it, and assuming the currency doesn't
collapse before you can spend it, with my system you just
earn-and-spend small amounts, never going into debt, and never
stockpiling large amounts of funds to spend later. So with my
system you don't have to worry for a long time if your investment
will go bad before you can spend it, and you don't have to worry
that your debt will drive you to bankruptcy if your source of
income dries up before your debt is paid.
> like Bernie Madoff investments,
Those weren't actually investments. Bernie and his wife and his
accountant fabricated stock trades to make it look like you owned
lots of stock, but in fact every dollar you put in yesterday has
already been spent to pay back earlier investors who wanted to bail
out, any leftovers from that payout going into Bernie and his
wife"s lavish lifestyle. What's left that *you* actually own is
nada, and if you ever get your "investment" (plus "profit") out,
it's not *you* money you're getting, it's some later sucker's
money.
> Enron stock,
The money invested there was a true investment in the sense that
you now owned shares of a company. But whether that company was
worth what you paid for it is a matter of some difficulty, and as
it turned out the company wasn't worth as much as you paid.
> promises of future benefits from the Social Security system,
That's a cross between something like a bank deposit, where your
money is sitting there to be withdrawn later, and a Ponzi scam
where later contributors are paying for current benefits, and
eventually when the money is all run out it'll be 100% Ponzi
briefly before it totally collapses. Unlike Bernie's Ponzi scam,
where if requests for withdrawl exceed new deposits Bernie can
stall for time, with Social Security benefits it's not feasible for
the government to delay third-of-month payouts more than a few days
if at all, so when the money runs out the scheme collapses almost
immediately after the third of the month.
> S&H Green Stamps (anyone remember those?),
I spent years collecting those, trying to build up enough to be
able to buy something worth buying. Then the system went out of
business and I lost all my labor and hope of value.
> airline miles,
I've never flown in an airline, so I can't speak first-hand about
these, but it's my understanding that if the airline doesn't go out
of business then lots of regular travellers do indeed cash in their
airline miles and thus get return on their investment. But still
that's a big risk giving the economic system with airlines going
out of business on a regular basis. The first such I recall is Pan
American, primarily because one of our neighbors was a pilot for
them at the time.
> or 1 contest entry in the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes?
That's just a lottery, with the expected payout far less than the
required investment, so it's just like going go a casino in Las
Vegas and throwing your money at the losing gambles.
> I'm not saying these are all total scams but they are
> considerably less liquid than cash and they might go bad at any
> time.
Yup. The main problem is putting lots of money in one place, for a
long time, with no law of nature guaranteeing you'll ever get your
money back out, only promises by companies and governments and
individuals, or sometimes not even promises just "maybe" statements
that can mean anything or nothing. If you've studied the Prisoner's
Dilemma game, and the optimal strategy (for **repeat** playing
only, not for one-shot game) of "Tit for Tat", you understand that
trust is best built incrementally by experience with a partner, not
by just putting your trust in what somebody says without any
evidence. Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scam is like organized religion,
where they promise you that when you die you go to Heaven, if only
you do what the Church says for all your life before you die.
There's no way to know whether they are lying, because you don't
get any incremental evidence, like you don't get to visit Heaven
every few weeks to verify that it's still there and that you are
still eligible to go there again later. In fact you never get to
see Heaven at all during your life. It's all a **huge** confidence
game for suckers who trust churches without any evidence. One big
difference is that some Madoff suckers got lucky, they asked to get
their money out at a time when there were enough new investors to
bail them out. Same with the stock bubble, where people who
liquidated their stock in 2007 made big profits while those who
waited until 2008-09 when the bubble had burst discovered there
were no more suckers to bail them out of the Ponzi stock market.
So in my system, I don't ask people to trust me to the point where
they make huge investments (years of labor) on the promise that
*eventually* they'll get their labor back out in the form of
services they would like to get. I just ask that people spend a few
minutes of labor and then immediately use their labor credits to
post Requests for Bids (RFBs) offering to hire others to work for
them to provide some small services they'd like to receive. So over
time, as they realize that spending a few minutes of labor to earn
credits really does allow them to hire others to work for them
again and again, over and over, they build up confidence that these
small exchanges are really a good idea, that they aren't losing
their investments, that they get back out everything they put in,
again and again.
> Your current setup involving seconds of labor, Turing tests, and
> biasing surveys is a toy application that nobody, including tax
> authorities, will take seriously.
Yes, but that's just my bootstrapping plan, to provide a way to
learn what services people *really* would like beyond just voting
in surveys. (The first survey question, set up at system-upgrade
time, is "What surveys would you like to vote/invest in?" Then the
second survey question, added by me as an ordinary user, will be
"What new features would you like in NewEco?", unless somebody else
jumps in and nominates some other survey during the few minutes
after I upgrade the system to include surveys before I have time to
nominate the new-features survey.) Hopefully somebody will suggest
some service non-toy for me to implement, maybe something I already
said I'd like to implement, or maybe something I didn't even think
of yet.
> I'm worried about what happens when it involves real-world labor
> in quantities of hours, weeks, and months,
That's not going to happen, except piecemeal by multiple contracts
each worth less than one dollar that add up over time, until and
unless I find a business partner to co-sign cheques for our users
who choose to cash in their credits after we first find somebody
who would rather pay cash for services instead of exchange labor
for labor. Then at that time we'll need to contract a lawyer to
deal with legal matters such as IRS filings, which will eat up most
of our income for a while. So any contracts longer than 440 seconds
each is in the distant future if at all.
Now I believe that since Safeway and Target often donate their gift
cards (usually $5 each) to local food banks, to be given out in
addition to the bags of food in November and/or December each year,
and also to mental-health clinics, to be given out at Christmas
parties each year, that there's a reaonable chance that either
company might be willing to donate some of their gift cards to
NewEco if and when NewEco has established a good reputation
locally, maybe next year sometime. I think single-store-chain gift
cards donated to a charity or cooperative don't require reporting
to IRS as income, so then I could offer them to the first/next
people who earn $5 of labor credits without needing to establish
all the IRS documentation that would be needed for payment in
regular currency or professional barter of amounts worth more than
one dollar.
> and when unemployed people can actually earn a living (that
> means, at a minimum, some way to buy food
Actually buying food isn't necessary around here. The food banks
have more than enough food for everyone who qualifies for their
services, which I believe includes everyone who is unemployed.
> and pay rent) with labor credits.
I'm not qualified to read other people's minds, but I rather doubt
that a landlord whose foreclosed home is sitting unoccupied, except
by squatters who then have to be chased away, is going to be
willing to let somebody live in the home for no money at all, only
for labor performed (directly or through my system). But for people
on SSI who can pay maybe half the rent, they might be willing to
accept half-cash half-labor payment of rent, because that's a lot
better for the landlord than letting the home sit unoccupied and
still have to pay property tax. At least the SSI-half would cover
the property tax and maintenance, and the labor-half would be the
extra factor to make the landlord maybe say OK.
> What prevents you from issuing a lot of labor credits in exchange
> for web design on your site, a new car, and dental services, in
> exchange for promises that those credits would be redeemable in the
> future?
The ongoing policy of *not* allowing people to build up huge
account balances, requiring them to spend their credits before they
get too large. When I have some over-eager users *trying* to build
up larger account balance then I'm comfortable owing to them, I'll
need to carefully consider the optimum limit on account balance. My
current idea as to what's reasonable is to allow an account balance
to get up to $6, which would allow cash-out of one $5 donated gift
card plus still have $1 left over, or allow posting six
simultaneous RFBs for $0.98 each with a few pennies left over.
> Then you disappear (or declare bankruptcy),
I can't do either (except by dying) because I have no money to go
anywhere and my subsidized low-income housing requires me to
declare each year at recertification whether I've ever declared
bankruptcy and thus become homeless if I've declared bankruptcy
during that last year before the crucial recertification.
> and no one else will accept the labor credits, so your suppliers
> are left holding worthless credits.
Yeah, if I die, and without my daily maintenance my Web site ceases
to function, there might be a few users who have up to $6 each in
unspent labor credits which are now unusable. Of course if I had a
business partner, or if I had a http://TinyURL.Com/RevTre to turn
my site into a self-maintaining pseudo-Wiki, then I could die and
my pseudo-Wiki could go on without my further presence, so long as
the PHP/MySQL hosting site stays in operation and doesn't delete my
account.
> Many scams like this (often with stock) have been pulled off
> before.
Except for chainletter/pyramid scams where large numbers of people
each contribute $5, I'm not aware of any scam where each sucker
loses such a small amount as my maximum of $6 (450*6 = 2700 seconds
= 45 minutes of labor).
> It's this problem that make people [missingWordsHere?] what backs
> up labor credits or any other kind of currency someone issues.
> If you do real labor bartering (this means in quantities like
> hours, weeks, and months, not seconds) and most of it between
> your users and your users, not with you as a party, then you have
> to deal with the tax laws.
Agreed. That's the reason I'm currently (until I have a business
parter and some **real** money coming in to pay the costs of
dealing with IRS) limiting each transaction to less than a dollar
at minimum wage of $8/hr, i.e. less than 450 seconds, i.e. no more
than 440 seconds.
> Two people who barter their own labor each have taxable income of
> the fair market value of the other person's labor they received.
Only if they are bartering their usual professional labor, not if
they are bartering random chores/favors unrelated to their ordinary
type of work. For example, if somebody who runs a business of
creating pottery, exchanges pottery for a hamburger, from some
hamburger restaurant, then both must declare income by sales. But
if the pottery expert helps somebody clean a garage, that doesn't
count as a business sale of services, so anything received in
return, such as babysitting by a neighbor who doesn't normally make
money babysitting, doesn't have to be declared as business income.
For trades worth less than $1 each, there's no question, the IRS
doesn't care. But for trades worth more than $1 each, the IRS needs
to be shown that it's not commercial sale, and things get messy,
and even if you are right that the IRS has right to tax your trade
and you have no requirement to file with IRS, still the IRS can
make trouble even when they're wrong, so it's best to avoid
anything over $1 even if non-commercial.
> (This isn't like bartering objects where selling an old item for
> less than you paid for it new involves no tax.)
Yeah, that's another type of trade. Since my system will be
exchanging labor, not physical objects, that's irrelevant.
> An intermediate organization (you) who acts as a go-between needs
> to do tax reporting in this situation.
Only if the exchanges involve more than $1 each, and only if the
exchanges involve what a person ordinarily does for cash payment.
It can be reasoably claimed that anyone unemployed more than ten
years has *no* profession whatsoever, so *anything* such a person
does is non-professional (i.e. *worthless* in any commercial sense)
hence non-taxable.
> Is your 1099-B form generator software ready yet?
If and when I have a business partner, and some cash income to pay
for a lawyer, I'll have money to pay for all those tax forms.
That's a big distant-future maybe.
> When you get to the point of bartering labor in real amounts I
> hope your accounting and tax reporting software is ready.
If and when I have a business partner, and some cash income to pay
for a lawyer, I'll have money to pay for all those tax forms.
That's a big distant-future maybe.
> A somewhat-related problem is that all labor is not worth the same.
The bidding system handles this nicely. If somebody can do work in
30 seconds, that takes everyone else 150 seconds, then that one
super-expert can bid 140 seconds, be the lowest bidder, and thus
get the contract, and get paid for 140 seconds of labor even though
only 30 seconds was performed. That means if per-contract labor is
priced (for IRS purposes) as $8/hr minimum wage, this super-expert
can get him/herself paid effectively $8*(140/30) = $37.33 per hour.
But as soon as there's somebody else able to do the same job in
less than 150 seconds and willing to get paid less than $37/hr, the
bidding war collapses the price to however long that second person
would take to do the job, or maybe somewhat more if that second
person likewise can win a bidding war against a third person. But
as soon as lots of different people can all do the same job in
about the same time, whichever of them is willing to be honest and
bid exactly the required time will get the contract, effectiely at
$8/hr, and anyone holding out for larger payrate will get NADA.
It's my opinion that a lot of people currently getting $50 or $100
per hour are really not worth that much compared to *unemployed*
people who could do the same job if given twice the time but who
would accept a payrate of less than half the hourly rate hence
would cost less to do the same job if only the company weren't
locked into the current employee.
> An hour of babysitting is not worth the same as an hour of heart
> surgery or an hour of web design.
An hour of web design is worth *nothing* whatsoever commercially,
since I can do it but nobody is willing to hire me to do it.
I agree that medical services such as surgery require special
license and can't be done by just anybody and are worth reasonably
high hourly wages, and I don't claim to handle those kinds of work
via NewEco. Even baby-sitting won't be covered by NewEco, unless
it's done via tele-operation WebCam with no physical presence. Now
one similar service that *might* eventually be included is
security, including neighborhood watch (to report suspicious
activity before a break-in or assault actually occurs) and store
security (reporting any crime-in-progress immediately) and
vicinity-of-store security (reporting anyone approaching a business
with obvious intent to commit a crime, especially in high-crime
areas such as Oakland and Richmond), and border security (reporting
when somebody crosses the Mexico/USA border where not allowed).
Several months ago I designed an InterNet-based security system for
such applications, but I had in mind that companies or
neighborhoods being protected would be willing to pay cash, so
NewEco wouldn't be needed.
> Hopefully you find people who do web design services in exchange
> for credits,
Let's re-phrase that slightly: People who *can* do web design
services, but who have been unable to find anybody to hire them,
because they have no paid experience on their resumes, because they
haven't gotten their first job yet, because nobody wants to hire
them, because they have no paid experience on their resume, ...
NewEco would give such people a chance to do their first credited
job, not for money but for labor-credits and appreciation and a
nice letter of recommendation and something they can put on their
resumes.
> people who do house remodeling in exchange for credits,
Just the overhead of getting *started* on such a job would involve
more than 440 seconds, so wouldn't fit into NewEco.
> and people who do dental work in exchange for credits,
Same: It takes more than 440 seconds just to get the patient's
mouth prepared for dental work. Also, you can't do the dental work
just any time you happen to respond to the RFB, you need to arrange
it days or weeks in advance so that the patient can show up the
same time as the dental worker. Not for NewEco.
> Now, when I go to trade a month's worth of web design and intend
> to later spend those credits ...
Moot since that's longer than the maximum allowed 45 minutes total
in your account balance.
Think of it this way: If you go out to eat in a restaurant, the
total time it takes you to shower and get dressed and drive to the
restaurant and get seated and order your food and wait for your
food to be cooked and served, before you even get a bite to eat, is
probably longer than 45 minutes, never mind when you're done you
still have to drive back home. So you never eat out, because you're
afraid those 45 minutes will be wasted when you arrive at the
restaurant and discover it went out of business during the two
hours between when you made the reservation and when you got served
your food? Why do you think an automated Web site is more likely to
go out of service between the time you earn up to 45 minutes of
labor credits and a few hours later when you spend them, than a
restaurant in financial trouble because of lack of customers during
a recession is likely to go out of business between the time you
make your reservation and the time you get served your food?
> When you get labor bartering up for real, what prevents you from
> buying huge amounts of goods and services (not worried about
> piddling 15 seconds of labor here: more worried about years)
The 40-second limit on individual transactions, and the 2700-second
limit on account balance, makes your question moot.
> Even if you aren't a crook, people will believe you *MIGHT* be.
> There's plenty of scammers out there.
If they are worried that $6 cash they give me, in payment for
future delivery of some goods or services, will go bad, they need
to see my ID and get a receipt in writing.
But if they labor for 45 minutes total via an automated Web site,
where they can redeem partial credit at *any* time, and in fact
they previously earned and immediately spent smaller amounts such
as 20 seconds or 2 minutes without problem, and they've built up
their trust to where some previous time they did three different
300-second contracts then spent most of the 900 seconds without
trouble, if now they are worried to death that spending 2700
seconds of labor will be wasted, maybe they should slow down and
build up and spend just 1500 seconds to build up their trust
further before taking the full plunge of investing the maximum of
2700 seconds of labor. It's sort of like if you're afraid of
drowning in a swimming pool, then you don't just dive in whole-body
at first, you first get your toes wet, then you get your ankles
wet, then get your calves wet, then get your knees wet then get
your thighs wet, then get your [censored] wet, then get your tummy
wet, then get your [censored] wet, then get your shoulders wet,
then get your neck wet, then get your chin wet, and only then after
several hours at the shallow end of the pool you finally get your
mouth and then your nose wet.
(No, I was teasing, that censored part of your body between your
thighs and your tummy isn't what you think it is. Ask me if you
want to come over and visit me and hear me sing that song from that
horrible Woodcraft Rangers summer camp I was forced to attend when I
was a child. "She went into the water and she got her toes wet,
she went into the water and she got her toes wet, she went into
the water and she got her toes wet, but she didn't get her
*clap*clap* wet yet. Glory glory hala hala lulah. Glory glory hala
hala lulah. Glory glory hala hala lulah. She didn't get her
*clap*clap* wet yet. She went ... ... ankles ... ... calves ...
... knees ... ... thighs ... but she didn't get her *clap*clap*
wet yet. She went into the water and she finally got it wet. She
went into the water and she finally got it wet. She went into the
water and she finally got it wet. Yes she finally got her
[censored] wet yet.")
Anyway, when I get surveys/polls fully implemented in a few days, I
won't be asking you to dive into the deep end of the pool by
immediately investing the maximum of 2700 seconds (45 minutes) of
your valuable labor (in 4-10 second pieces) in the hope eventually
it'll be redeemable for something more valuable than influencing
the result of surveys/polls. I'll just be asking you to get your
toes wet with maybe a half minute of your time (like maybe 4-5
Turing questions averaging 6-7 seconds each). It'll take much less
of your time, and is likely to be more fun, than reading my
more longwinded newsgroup articles.
Oh, by the way, tonight I finished the survey-audit program (to
detect and interactively purge when I was testing the
survey-answer-proposal code and left one user having submitted more
than the allowed one answer per question, and to automatically
purge all the instances where my incomplete code during development
generated a survey-answer without the accompanying formal
nomination by the user with one millisecond of labor-credit for it)
and thus have a clean/consistent database now, and then I got back
to work on the new-answer-nomination code, so that you'll be able
not only to make a brand-new nomination but you'll be able to come
back and edit your old nomination if it hasn't yet been accepted by
the WebMaster (me). But then I reached the point of grogginess
about two hours ago and switched to this less-alert-requiring task
of responding to newsgroup articles. But now I've nearly reached my
limit of grogginess for even doing this, so right after I send this
I'll be crashing for real.
Gordon Burditt
>> credits on your site as opposed to other forms of currency,
>
>Because these labor credits are available any time you want to
>spend a few minutes to earn them, unlike money which you can't just
>**get** any time you want to work for it,
"Because it's convenient" is not a good reason to trust anyone.
"Because it's so useless I can't steal much from you at one time"
makes it pretty useless to bother with your setup at all. I don't
buy lunch one fry at a time, either. But there are chain-letter
scammers who try to steal $1 at a time.
If you're still talking about toy amounts like 15 seconds of labor,
I can still get equivalent amounts of money when I want to (for
instance, collecting recyclable materials and selling them). And
I probably wouldn't care if you ran off with three cents worth of
labor credits - and it's not worth the price of a bullet to shoot
you.
Now, if you're talking about serious amounts of labor credits -
hours, weeks, or months, which you indicate you eventually want to
do, why should I trust you?
>you need to go to a lot
>of trouble to get a *job* for somebody and then you're stuck at
>that job until you quit or get fired or laid off, and while you
>still have the job you basially have a fixed income. My system is
>flexible, that you work for labor-credits whenever you think you
>might need to spend them, then you try to spend them right after
>you get them.
That doesn't work for any but toy amounts of labor credits.
You can't do that for enough labor credits to buy a tank of gas or
have your suit drycleaned or have your hair styled.
>Instead of buying something you can't currently
>afford, on credit, and then spending the next 30 years paying off
>the loan, or saving in a bank account for 30 years in the hopes
>you'll still be alive and healthy and even want your big purchase
>when you can finally afford it, and assuming the currency doesn't
>collapse before you can spend it, with my system you just
>earn-and-spend small amounts, never going into debt, and never
>stockpiling large amounts of funds to spend later. So with my
If you want things like a house, a car, furniture, etc., you have
to stockpile large amounts of some kind of currency first, or go
into debt. These things cost more than a few seconds of labor,
no matter what currency you're using to buy them.
>system you don't have to worry for a long time if your investment
>will go bad before you can spend it, and you don't have to worry
>that your debt will drive you to bankruptcy if your source of
>income dries up before your debt is paid.
It's a toy system where you can't buy anything real if you
limit balances like that.
>> like Bernie Madoff investments,
>
>Those weren't actually investments.
They were represented to people as investments. You're representing
that I can earn labor credits NOW and then use them later. How is
that different? The only difference seems to be is that you do it
in such small quantities that it's completely useless.
Such small quantities of labor are difficult to sell, anyway, unless
they can be done over the web. If I want someone to do some labor
for me, say, mowing my lawn, cutting my hair, sewing a button on a
shirt, etc., we have to get together at the same place and that
transportation cost (even if we live on the same block) swamps the
tiny balance limit you have on labor credits.
>Yup. The main problem is putting lots of money in one place, for a
>long time, with no law of nature guaranteeing you'll ever get your
>money back out, only promises by companies and governments and
>individuals, or sometimes not even promises just "maybe" statements
>that can mean anything or nothing.
You made a claim at one point that unemployed people would actually
be able to earn a living with labor credits. That means accumulating
enough credits to, say, pay a month of rent. Or buy a suit. Or
buy a bus pass good for a month. When you've got your site going
to handle quantities this, why should I trust you?
>So in my system, I don't ask people to trust me to the point where
>they make huge investments (years of labor) on the promise that
>*eventually* they'll get their labor back out in the form of
>services they would like to get.
If what they want *COSTS* years of labor (e.g. college tuition),
how do they avoid this?
>I just ask that people spend a few
>minutes of labor and then immediately use their labor credits to
>post Requests for Bids (RFBs) offering to hire others to work for
>them to provide some small services they'd like to receive. So over
>time, as they realize that spending a few minutes of labor to earn
>credits really does allow them to hire others to work for them
>again and again, over and over, they build up confidence that these
>small exchanges are really a good idea, that they aren't losing
>their investments, that they get back out everything they put in,
>again and again.
Scammers use this method to suck people in, then take them big time.
Bernie Madoff likely started people with moderate investments at
first. That you're trustworthy with pennies doesn't prove that
you're trustworthy with thousands of dollars.
So you're saying it's a toy system and will stay a toy system.
Are you sure the IRS isn't interested in wages over a dollar
*ACCUMULATED OVER A WHOLE YEAR*?
Jerry Stuckle
Gordon, this quote from him says everything:
"An hour of web design is worth *nothing* whatsoever commercially,
since I can do it but nobody is willing to hire me to do it."
So since no one is willing to pay HIM for web design, web design is
worth nothing.
Interesting that I get paid quite well for said design. My time is
definitely NOT worth nothing to my customers.
Curtis Dyer
http://tinyurl.com/uh3t) wrote:
> From: gor...@hammy.burditt.org (Gordon Burditt)
>> One problem I have here is: Why should someone trust labor
>> credits on your site as opposed to other forms of currency,
> [...] Instead of buying something you
> can't currently afford, on credit, and then spending the next 30
> years paying off the loan, or saving in a bank account for 30
> years in the hopes you'll still be alive and healthy and even
> want your big purchase when you can finally afford it, and
> assuming the currency doesn't collapse before you can spend it,
> with my system you just earn-and-spend small amounts, never
> going into debt, and never stockpiling large amounts of funds to
> spend later. So with my system you don't have to worry for a
> long time if your investment will go bad before you can spend
> it, and you don't have to worry that your debt will drive you to
> bankruptcy if your source of income dries up before your debt is
> paid.
Sure, there are always going to be risks, but some are more
reasonable than others. There's nothing wrong with "stockpiling"
funds for later. If I have an emergency down the line with tight
funds (car trouble, health problems, etc.), a savings account can
be a great help. Although I might get hit by a bus tomorrow, that
doesn't stop me from trying to save funds today.
<snip>
>> An hour of babysitting is not worth the same as an hour of
>> heart surgery or an hour of web design.
>
> An hour of web design is worth *nothing* whatsoever
> commercially, since I can do it but nobody is willing to hire me
> to do it.
Just because you're unable to find anyone to compensate you for
your Web development services doesn't mean an hour of Web
development is worth "nothing...commercially."
<snip>
>> Hopefully you find people who do web design services in
>> exchange for credits,
>
> Let's re-phrase that slightly: People who *can* do web design
> services, but who have been unable to find anybody to hire them,
> because they have no paid experience on their resumes, because
> they haven't gotten their first job yet, because nobody wants to
> hire them, because they have no paid experience on their resume,
> ... NewEco would give such people a chance to do their first
> credited job, not for money but for labor-credits and
> appreciation and a nice letter of recommendation and something
> they can put on their resumes.
The situation isn't as much a Catch-22 as you make it out to be.
Even if you come fresh out of school and are unable to find your
ideal job, you can still try things like Craigslist or look up
local small businesses.
<snip>
--
Curtis Dyer
<? $x='<? $x=%c%s%c;printf($x,39,$x,39);?>';printf($x,39,$x,39);?>
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> ... you are of no use to me. And as a programmer, you also are
> of no use to me.
That's redundant. You don't seem very bright.
> It would take me less time to do it myself in the first place.
Several days ago I looked at your company Web site, and I notice
that you claim to have classes for programming in C and C++ etc.,
but not PHP. Why not? Do you consider PHP too difficult to learn,
so you haven't learned it yet? Or do you consider PHP so easy that
there's not a single person anywhere on Earth who would need to
take a class to learn PHP?
> >> let's see the cash.
> > I don't have any cash.
> So we're back to the fact you're looking for free labor.
Nope, it's trade labor, which isn't free.
You really don't seem intelligent at all.
How come you can't see the difference between free labor and barter
my labor for yours?
> > I never ask for cash in advance. I only ask for a few seconds of
> > labor in advance, then the resultant labor credits are immediately
> > redeemable for services.
> Which will be worthless.
Perhaps to you, because you have poisoned your mind against me and
can't see any value in anything I ever do, but my labor credits
will be useful to other people.
> Here's an idea. Do what I do. When I need help, I PAY for it.
Hey, that's good that you have so much money burning a hole in your
pocket. Maybe you should hire me to write PHP/MySQL scripts for
you, since you don't seem to know how to do PHP.
> And they are supposed to eat "labor credits"? ROFLMAO!
So if somebody offers you paper money for work, you turn down the
job because you can't eat paper money? And if somebody offers
direct deposit of your wages, again you turn it down because you
can't eat direct deposits?
If some local farmer wants to get some work done to set up a Web
site to advertise the farm goods, and doesn't have cash handy, but
has some extra unsold produce available, that person might offer
the produce in return for labor credits, and then use the labor
credits to hire somebbody to do the Web site. So the person who did
the Web site could eat what the labor credits paid for, the same as
money can't be eaten but pays for food that can be eaten. I'm just
setting up a new kind of currency that anybody can get easily,
compared to the US dollar which about 25% of adults in the USA are
unable to get except by charity/welfare.
> >> If your project is worth it, then you can raise the money.
> > How would you suggest I find somebody willing to invest $money$,
> > not just time, in NewEco?
> You're a genius. Figure it out.
You don't understand genus at all. Genius is the ability to solve
complex problems, given information available. Genius almost never
helps obtain inforation that isn't readily available.
> >> You're a genius, I'm sure you can get a loan.
> > Only if you provide me with the information I need. Genius just
> > means that with adequate information I can figure out the solution
> > to the problem. But without the needed information, an IQ of ten
> > thousand wouldn't be able solve the problem.
> OK, you figure out the solution to the problem and get the financing.
OK, you provide with sufficient information that I can derive a
mathematical solution, and I'll see if I can do so. It's your move.
> In other words, you can't convince anyone else to invest in your
> scheme, either.
I don't know anybody. I don't know any way to get introduced to
anybody who would be interested in investing in NewEco.
> >> Then I suggest you get a real job.
> > How would you propose I do that?
> You're a genius. Figure it out.
Once again you have a really misguided idea of what genius is good
for and what it isn't. I've done everything reasonable to get a
job, without success, and unless you can suggest something I
haven't tried yet, I'm stuck with no way to make progress, except
if NewEco turns out to be a big hit and I get famous and lots of
people start to seek me for working for them.
> No, but then I am also paying people. Hard cash.
That's possible only because you already *have* hard cash. Those of
us who don't have any hard cash, don't have the options that you
have. NewEco will fix that, let *everyone* hire people.
> I'm not going to do your work for you - especially for free. You
> want to build a business, you need to learn how to run a business.
I'll make you the same offer that I've made to employment agencies
for the past 30 years: You find me a job, and I pay you 25% of my
first $10k of income from that job. If you're any good, that'll get
you $2500. But you're no good, so you won't accept my offer.
> The bottom line is - you have no idea how to run a business.
I have a little bit of an idea. First I need to find some customers
for my product or service. Then I need to write up a "business
plan".
> You're looking for free help.
Nope.
> In return, you promise future "labor credits" which are worthless.
You've just contradicted yourself. If I offer something in return
for the help I get, then I'm not asking for free help. It doesn't
matter whether *you* mistakenly believe my labor is worthless,
because it's of value to others.
> I suggest you get a real job.
I've been trying for 18+ years, without luck. If you have any
suggestions how I can get a job now, please say. Otherwise shut the
fuck up with your statements to do something I'm already trying to
do but don't know how to do.
By the way, if your personal time is so valuable, why do you waste
so much of it writing attack letters against me and posting them in
newsgroups? Couldn't you put your valuable time to better use,
making $money$ somehow? Or are you incapable of making money, that
your Web site claming your computer-programming classes is just a
sham, there are no such classes, you're just waiting for the first
sucker to send you money for non-existant classes? If you *really*
had a way to peform labor in return for money, you'd be doing it
instead of spending time attacking me. I can only conclude that you
are just as destitute as I am, unable to find anybody to pay you
for your worthless labors, but you're less honest than I am,
unwilling to admit your time is just as worthless as you mistakenly
belive mine is.
By the way, tonight I finished the code to allow one of my NewEco
users to not only nominate a new answer to a survey question, but
to amend a previously nominated answer. Next I'll need to write the
code that allows the master user to approve such a nomination, or
reject it if it's obviously absurd or obscene or abusive etc., or
amend it if it's almost perfect but has some little mistake/typo.
Jerry Stuckle
<Another huge bunch of bullshit snipped, saving oodles of usenet electrons>
For someone who claims to be a genius, you really have no idea why
someone won't hire you. That becomes more obvious with each post - your
time is as worthless to everyone else as it is to me.
It's also becoming more and more apparent why you can't find anyone to
invest in your project - or to help you with it.
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> >> credits on your site as opposed to other forms of currency,
> >Because these labor credits are available any time you want to
> >spend a few minutes to earn them, unlike money which you can't just
> >**get** any time you want to work for it,
> From: gor...@hammy.burditt.org (Gordon Burditt)
> "Because it's convenient" is not a good reason to trust anyone.
OK, maybe I didn't phrase that very well. The trouble with regular
currency is that in general you can't just **get** it any time you
want. There isn't any work place where you can just walk in off the
street any time you need money and start to work and earn as much
money as you might want and then quit and take home your money, no
strings attached. Since you can't get money in the first place, the
whole question of trusting it is moot to begin with.
But my labor credits *will* be earnable *any* time you have some
time available to work for them. So at least there's the
*consideration* whether they are worth doing that work to get, or
not.
So their universal availablity, and contrarywise the *lack*
availability of regular currencies, is a good reason *not* to trust
those other currencies as anything you can easily get and find of
value. You can't get them, so it's moot if they'd have any value. A
unicorn would allegedly be very valuable, but there ain't no such
thing, so the value of a non-existant unicorn is zero.
Note your question was why to trust labor credits AS OPPOSED TO
other currencies. Since the other currencies are non-available,
that would seem to be a good reason to oppose trusting them (unless
you by chance are so fortunate to find somebody with lots of
currency willing to give you some of theirs).
So that leaves the question, why trust labor credits (ignoring
comparing them with other non-available currencies)?
That's the result of a "scientific/consumer" experiment:
First you spend a few seconds of your time earning labor credits.
Then you try spending some of them and see if you get anything
of value for them. If you do get something of value, then you earn
some more and spend some of those and check again whether they got
you anything of value. Over time, if again and again you can easily
earn labor credits and then use them to purchase a fair value of
services of value to you, then you grow toward a conclusion that
the labor credits really are trustworthy in the economic sense.
So I am not asking you for blind trust in labor credits. I'm just
asking you to spend a few seconds of your time to start earning
them and spending them. At the moment the only thing you can spend
them on is browsing my Web site to see what meta-survey answers
have been proposed and the totals of other users' votes on them,
and voting on whichever of them you prefer. I'm hoping you'll vote
for the survey/poll that asks what features you'd like installed in
my NewEco system, features that you believe would be much more
valuable to you than surveys/polls. If I get enough votes for the
what-features poll, then I'll feel like it would be worth my time
to write the code to implement that poll. Then if I get enough
votes *in* the what-features poll, indicating what specific
features are most wanted, then I'll feel like it would be worth my
time to write the code to iimplement those new features.
So right now NewEco is in an early bootstrapping phase, where I
don't expect people to each spend hours of time working to earn
labor credits to influence the polls, but if people would just
spend a few seconds each to vote for what they want me to
implement, then "down the road" (in a week or so after they vote)
the most voted-for features would get implemented (by me) and
*then* you will really get your labor's worth in using those
features on my system, and at that time your investment of several
minutes of labor to earn credits to pay for several minutes of use
of your chosen services would be in order.
> "Because it's so useless I can't steal much from you at one time"
Actually I'm not getting any value from your answering Turing
questions to earn labor credits to spend to vote in surveys. I
already know all the answers to the Turing questions, and it
doesn't matter if a thousand new people each answer all the
questions I get no value from your answers. I just use them as a
"free gift" to real live humans using my system, to protect from
spambotnets flooding my system with bogus requests. Anybody five
years old who knows how to read and type on a computer can probably
answer most of them. (I went through the pre-school spelling
program I developed for my pre-school/kindergarden children
starting in 1995 and copied *only* the missing-word questions that
I thought were really really easy for other people who weren't very
familiar with my favorite music as my children were.)
Stealing would be having you give me something that is of value to
me (with nothing of value in return). Since I get no value from
your filling in missing words I already know, it can't possibly be
stealing. Even if I asked you to spend two minutes filling in
missing words every time you make a service request, that still
wouldn't be stealing, although it would in that case be a bit of a
burden on you. But in fact, ten seconds of time spent filling in
one missing word gives you ten seconds of PHP/MySQL script time,
which is at least a hundred script runs, more likely a thousand or
more. Since it takes you probably 5-10 seconds just to navigate
each HTML form to tell it what you want to do next, totalling
[5..10] * [100..1000] = 500 .. 10000 seconds, the measily 10
seconds you must spend to fill in a missing word is much less than
one percent extra time, not worth fussing over. Would you rather
spend 10 seconds filling in a missing word, then get 100-1000
transactions, or would you rather have to look past flashy
advertisements all over each and every form you ever look at, the
way Yahoo and Google assault you with advertisement overload
whenever you use their Web sites? It probably takes you a lot
longer than 10 seconds total to ignore the flashy advertisements on
Yahoo and Google when performing a thousand transactions. In fact
it probably takes you at least two seconds to find your search
results or e-mail etc. between the ads *every* time a new screen
comes up, and Yahoo's animated ads probably distract you for
several additional seconds per page you view. My 10 seconds of your
time to fill in one missing word per several thousand pages viewed,
averages about a hundredth of a second of your time "stolen" [sic]
per page view. If you accuse me of "stealing" your time, you should
**really** accuse Yahoo and Google of "stealing" at least two
orders of magnitude more of your valuable time when browsing
*their* Web sites.
> I don't buy lunch one fry at a time, either.
If you had no money, not a penny, and somebody offered you to work
for five seconds reading a randomly-selected menu item and spotting
the missing word, and in return you'd be paid one french-fry
(potato strip) you could eat on the spot, and that offer was
repeatable as many times as you wanted, and it took you 15 seconds
to eat that French fry, so only 1/4 of your time is spent reading
menu items and saying the missing word, with 3/4 of your time spent
eating, would you turn down the offer because having to work for
your fries is beneath you, you'd rather starve to death than work
for five seconds per french-fry?
> But there are chain-letter scammers who try to steal $1 at a time.
That actually *is* stealing, because they *receive* those dollars,
and collect them together, profiting from your willingness to give
them your dollars. Since I get no benefit from your fill-ins of
missing words, your comparison makes no sense.
Now if I were asking you to do something actually useful to me,
whereupon I'd actually profit from your labor, and if you got
nothing of value back from me, *then* that would be analagous to
stealing, with labor instead of dollar as the currency, but still
the basic idea of me profiting from your loss. But that's not how
my system works. Read this sequence:
-1- You fill out an account-creation form, and are awarded 5
seconds of labor-credit just for doing that.
-2- You answer one missing-word question, and are awarde 4-10
seconds of labor credit depending on how long such a question
usually takes. (If you are especially quick and bright, you
might take only 5 seconds to answer a 10-second question, so
then you'd be paid 10 seconds of credit for only 5 seconds of
labor. (The way Jerry Stuckle has been bragging, I bet he
believes he can answer a 10 point question in only 3 seconds.)
If you are especially stupid and slow, you might spend 10
seconds to answer a 5-second question, so you'd get paid only
5 seconds of credit for the 10 seconds you actually took. But
if you were hired for a *real* job and worked so poorly you'd
be fired from the job and not get *anything* for your labor.
At least with my system you get what you're really worth
compared to equal-trade for the average person.)
-- Note that so-far I'm getting nothing of value for your labors.
-3- You have now accumulated more than 6 labor credits (the 5 you
started with, minus about 10-100 millisecods consumed in site
navigation, plus 4-10 seconds earned for filling in one
missing word), so you're qualified to spend some of your
labor-credits on expressing your preference with my
surveys/polls. This is much less effort required compared to
regular voting, where you have to spend 15 minutes getting
dressed, then spend 10 minutes driving or walking to a polling
place, then spend 10 minutes waiting in line, then spend 5
minutes showing your identification and signing your name and
getting your ballot and finding a booth, then you vote, then
you spend 15 minutes turning in your ballot and getting back
home. And your vote as to what features I'll implement in
NewEco has more weight than your vote for President etc. in
most elections. So your vote here is a real bargain, only a
few seconds spent in addition to the voting itself,
instead of a full hour of extra time with regular voting.
-- Note that so-far the only value I've gotten from your efforts is
knowledge of what you want me to implement. You should be
*glad* that your voice is being heard.
-- Note that since the ten or fifteen seconds you already have in
your account pays for hundreds or thousands of PHP script-runs,
you can probably afford to deposit one or two of those
labor-seconds in the surveys and still be above the 6-second
threshold for continued access to surveys.
-4- As soon I know what you want, and I get it implemented, then
you can start spending some of your labor credits for actually
useful, or at least potentially-useful, services that I
implemented at your request. For a while you can continue to
live off the new-account 5 seconds plus the 4-10
single-missing-word seconds as you play with the new service
to evaluate whether it's really going to be of value to you.
But eventually you'll exhaust your already-earned labor
seconds and need to answer one more missing-word question,
after which you'll get to use the new service for another
while. So basically for the very small extra effort of *very*
occasional missing-word questions you have to answer, you are
getting a free trial of the new service you requested. How can
you possibly accuse me of *stealing* from you under such
circumstances? Actually I'd have more right to accuse you of
stealing from me, stealing the hundreds of hours of
professional PHP/MySQL software-engineering time which you can
use virtually for free.
-- Note that at this point you're getting essentially free-trial of
services you requested. I'm still getting *nothing* of value
back from you. You are getting familiar with the service you
requested and I implemented, and learning if it's actualy
useful to you or not. If you feel it's not useful, you spend
your labor-credits voting for me to implement something else,
and we're back to step #3. If you feel it *is* useful, you
probably want to do something of value to me in return, so we
have the next step:
-5- You browse the Requests for Bids (RFBs) on my system and pick
some task you believe you can perform faster than anyone else
on my system, and you make a bid, and indeed your bid is
lowest, so you get the contract, and you perform the contract,
and you get paid whatever your bid was in labor credits,
surely a *lot* more than the 4-10 seconds of missing-word
questions, probably several minutes. Now you have funds to
make *serious* *major* use of my service you found so very
useful.
-- Note: You do step 5 *only* *after* you've gotten a free trial of
one of my services you *truly* find valuable to you, valuable
enough that you want to make major use of it, where 4-10 second
missing-word questions won't give you enough labor-credits to
make such major use of it. I strongly recommend you don't jump
suddenly from 4-10 second usages to multi-minute usages. Rather
build up your usage time slowly. Here's a sample progression
you might use:
-a- Alternate between 4-10 missing-word income and deposits into
surveys/polls, building up perhaps 20 or 30 seconds of credit
in polls. Then suddenly withdraw all that credit to pay for 10
to 30 seconds of the useful service.
-b- Repeat missing-word questions to accumulate 20-30 seconds in
the survey/poll "bank", then withdraw some of it to put up in
escroll to cover the 10% failure-to-perform on a contract.
Make a bid on some really quick task such as doing a Google
search and copying the best result back to me, where it'll
take you maybe 60-100 seconds to do the whole task, so you'll
need 6-10 seconds in escroll until you complete the task
successfully.
-c- Spend half of your truly earned 60-100 seconds of credit on the
service you find truly useful, and save the rest for escroll
for larger contracts.
-d- Make a bid on a more time-consuming task, maybe 5 minutes (300
seconds), where you will need 30 seconds of credit in escroll.
Earn that 300 seconds by completing the contract successfully.
-e- Now you can *really* make use of the new valuable service,
maybe for weeks before you have used up half your accumulated
funds.
-f- Every day or so, when you have time, browse the RFBs, to see if
there are any you'd like to bid on, to earn more labor
credits, to postpone the day when you get close to running out
of funds. Thus you have the leisure to choose just the
contracts you'd find easy to do and perhaps even enjoyable to
do, and ignore all the rest, and meanwhile always have plenty
of funds in your account to spend on days or weeks of use of
the valuable service before you risk running low on funds.
-- Note: When you make a bid, you have no idea whether the RFB
you're responding to was posted by me as admin using system
funds, or by me as ordinary user using funds I earned the same
way you earn funds, or by some other user. Thus when you
perform the contract you have no idea whether you are directly
helping me and/or the system you are using, or you are
performing a useful service for some other user and thus making
the labor-credits that person earned more valuable than if the
only thing he/she could ever buy were direct services on my system.
Likewise if you post a RFB and somebody does what you asked and
you pay them for their labor, you have no idea whether the
person who provided that service to you was me or some other user.
> If you're still talking about toy amounts like 15 seconds of
> labor, I can still get equivalent amounts of money when I want to
> (for instance, collecting recyclable materials and selling them).
With all the homeless people going around collecting stuff as fast
as it becomes available, willing to spend all day to collect
aluminum cans worth maybe ten dollars, thus getting less than a
dollar per hour for their collecting labors, I really don't think
you'll be able to find enough recyclables they overlooked to be
able to achieve even minimum wage for your efforts. And the
*minimum* start-up cost is really high for recyclables. It takes at
least ten minutes to travel to the recycle place just to turn in
your first one can, worth only 15 seconds of minimum-wage labor.
With my system, the only start-up fee is however long it takes you
to copy+paste http://TinyURL.Com/Portl1 to your Web browser and
press ENTER and press ENTER again and fill out a couple forms to
get a new account and then fill out the login form. No ten minutes
driving or bicycling to a recycle place, no thirty minutes trying
to find a can or bottle the homeless people overlooked. The
start-up overhead of turning in recyclables is so grossly high
compared to my online system. You really wouldn't want to spend a
half hour of your time to get paid only 15 seconds at minimum wage.
> And I probably wouldn't care if you ran off with three cents
> worth of labor credits
You don't have to worry about that any more, like if one of my PHP
scripts runs for three seconds because of some system glitch. A few
days ago I changed the billing algorithm so that PHP/MySQL scripts
never charge more than 100 milliseconds per run, not matter how
long they actually took to run. So now it's down to an occasional
100 milliseconds you got charge for some script-run that usually
takes only 20 milliseconds. So I think now you can go ahead and try
my online system at http://TinyURL/Com/Portl1 and get familiar with
how it works currently, and then watch for more features as the
days/weeks pass by. Be sure to spend three seconds of your labor
credits investing in the meta-survey/poll, OK?
> Now, if you're talking about serious amounts of labor credits -
> hours, weeks, or months,
I can't legally do that without:
- Knowing precisely who you are.
- Getting certification that you are legally allowed to work in the
USA, which means you have to be a citizen or a permanent
resident alien or be here on a special work permit that allows
this kind of work. This also includes getting your taxpayer ID
i.e. your social security number.
- Getting an employer's ID number for myself.
- Reporting to IRS each work session you perform that lasts longer
than 7.5 minutes ($1.00 at the legal minimum wage of $8/hr).
- Getting you to fill out a W-2 form indicating your number of
exemptions etc.
- Withholding social security and income taxes from your income.
- Somehow knowing for sure that *you* are actually doing the work,
not acting as a front for an illegal alien who is really doing
the work.
That last one is the difficult part unless you have a WebCam
watching you as you work or you travel to Sunnyvale and I
personally watch you do the work. It ain't gonna happen until and
unless some government decides to use my system to manage
government-funded work, and set up work centers where you must
travel to actually perform the work, whereupon the government will
have their own people do all those employer-overhead tasks, and pay
me $cash$ for usage of my system.
> which you indicate you eventually want to do
Yeah, if and when I find a government, or maybe a large company
with benolevant tendencies, willing to work with me. In the
foreseeable future, expect:
- "toy" system with only surveys/polls, for the next week or so;
- "micro" system with only some simple service that you-all want,
as chosen by your votes in the surveys/polls, for the next month
or so;
- "micro" labor-exchange with all contracts less than 7.5 minutes,
in the foreseeable future maybe starting in December.
If you do eighteen 440-second contracts per day, that's equivalent
to $17.60 per day at the legal minimum wage, allowing you to
purchase almost an equivalent value in services provided to you by
others. Can you think of any one kind of service, or any collection
of little bits of different services, which would add up to where
you'd be willing to pay $17.60 per day for the services, hence
you'd be willing to do the eighteen contracts per day to pay for
the services you'd be getting in return?
Honestly what I had more in mind for typical use of this system is
that maybe ten time per day there's this question bugging you,
something simple like what episode of a program had something
happen, or who was that cute actress in that TV commercial about
such-and-such, etc., and you could spend twenty minutes doing a
Google search trying to satisfy your curiousity, but you'd rather
spend 20 seconds typing up your question and 20 seconds submitting
it as an RFB for anyone who can get the answer in less than 2
minutes, and spend 20 seconds later reading the answer that comes
back from whoever did the contract, and some other time spend two
minutes working for somebody else who wants something that is easy
for you, to earn that 2 minutes of labor-credits back. For example,
I might be willing to pay 2 minutes of labor-credits to anyone who
can answer my next PHP question promptly. Maybe that could be you.
> That doesn't work for any but toy amounts of labor credits.
> You can't do that for enough labor credits to buy a tank of gas
> or have your suit drycleaned or have your hair styled.
Well, first there's the question of what gasoline station (I assume
you mean liquid fuel, "petrol" or "gasoline", not a true gas) or
drycleaner would find enough value in the kinds of services my
system would provide that they'd be willing to somehow arrange to
accept my system's labor credits in lieu of cash. More likely
somebody who deals in information technology, whose time is worth a
lot more than $8/hr, would realize the value in the services, but
prefer to pay $8/hr for services rather than perform an hour of
labor for an hour of services. So the some real $cash$ would be
inserted into my system, which could then be collected in the form
of gasoline or drycleaner gift cupons. Each cupon would be worth
$1, and you'd collect as many as you needed to pay for the gasoline
or drycleaning you needed. Or if you didn't have enough gift cupons
you'd pay with a mix of cupons and real $cash$.
So now let's do the math: Each transaction is less than a dollar,
let's say 80 cents. Each five 80-cent payments you get allow you
to exchange them for four $1 cupons.
Gasoline costs about $3/gallon, and when your tank is about 1/4
full you fill it back up, about 10 gallons needed, for a cost of
$30. So you need 30 cupons which came from 37.5 of those 80-cent
payments. You need to fill up your tank again about every two
weeks, so that's about 19 of those 80-cent contracts you need to do
per week, i.e. about 3 per day. If you can't find time to bid on
and perform 3 of those 7-minute contracts per day, what's wrong
with you?
MIcro-contracts adding up over time are like a leaky faucet that
drips only one drop per five seconds but can flood your home if
left unattended for two weeks. Yeah, each drop is small, each
micro-contract is small, but over time the dripping ruins your
carpet, and the micro-contracts pay for your gasoline.
Unlike recycling cans and bottles, where there's a *huge* overhead
just getting started, with NewEco any spare moments you feel like
contracting to work another 440 seconds you "just do it" (make bid,
get contract, do it, get paid), and those spare moments can really
add up. Maybe you turn the sound off during TV commercials, which
last 3 minutes per group, four groups per half-hour program. So you
arrange to do one 2-minute contract during each commercial break,
four (8 minutes total) per half hour. You do the math this time. If
you watch 4 hours of TV each day, and use most of the commercial
breaks to work via NewEco, how much do you earn per two-week
gasoline-fillup period?
> If you want things like a house, a car, furniture, etc., you have
> to stockpile large amounts of some kind of currency first, or go
> into debt.
That actually doesn't have to be true at all. Have you ever heard
of the concept of rent-to-own? I wrote it up a few weeks ago, don't
remember where I put what I wrote. The basic idea is that you start
by paying the rent on your dream home, but any extra money you have
available goes to purchase equity in the home. After you own some
equity in the home, rent then is split proportionally according to
who owns the share of equity, so that as time goes on the larger
share of the home you've already purchased the more of the rent
goes to yourself and the less goes to the original owner, until
when you've finally finished purchasing 100% equity in the home you
no longer have to pay *any* rent to the previous owner. If you lose
your job and can't pay your current share of the rent, you start
selling equity back to get cash to pay your share of the rent. If
at any time your equity drops all the way back to zero, the you
*must* pay the basic rent or face eviction. But if you have 5 years
of equity paid already when a bad recession happens and you have to
sell back equity until you have a job again, you aren't going to
have to move out because you won't have sold all your equity before
your next job.
> These things cost more than a few seconds of labor, no matter
> what currency you're using to buy them.
Let's say the basic rent on your home is $1500 per month. That's
$50 per day. So if you get unemployed and have lots of time on your
hands, when you're watching TV and working only during commercial
breaks you can do eight 2-minute contracts per hour, and when not
watching TV (or able to work even during the program) you can
probably do five of those 440 second (7 min 20 sec) contracts per
hour, 15 hours per day, earning about 33000 seconds (more than $70)
of labor-credit per day, easily paying the rent with some left over
to pay for food or to purchase some equity in the home.
> It's a toy system where you can't buy anything real if you limit
> balances like that.
Right now both contract amounts and account balance are severely
limited, the contract limited to under $1 each to avoid needing to
report to IRS each transaction which would require *only* legal
residents of USA with work permit could use my system, and the
account balance limited precisely to avoid anyone investing too
much before spending it and then discovering I offer nothing worth
buying (like Green Stamps, and later Blue Chip Stamps too), and
thus becoming angry at me for luring him/her into working hours or
days for nothing of value in return, and deciding that bullet in
gun you mentionned earlier really did sound like a good idea. I'd
rather any dissatisfied users of my system spend their earnings
quickly and learn quickly they don't like my services and tell me
what they don't like about them and stop using my system, before
their investment exceeds the cost of a bullet. And if and when some
store contributes gift cards to my system, I'd rather they be $5
cards, nothing larger, again so somebody won't be just a couple
dollars short of a $20 gift card then be unable to earn that last
$2 and get mad at me and decide a bullet sounds like a good idea.
They can have those $5 gift cards in their pocket or whereever they
keep such things, and accumulate enough to buy that fill-up of
gasoline or dry cleaning etc.
(splitting my reply here, before your Bernie Madoff remarks)
The Natural Philosopher
read this post.
Oh, this is a revolutionary idea. It WILL happen. If its not you,
someone else will do it. However...
> I can't legally do that without:
> - Knowing precisely who you are.
> - Getting certification that you are legally allowed to work in the
> USA, which means you have to be a citizen or a permanent
> resident alien or be here on a special work permit that allows
> this kind of work. This also includes getting your taxpayer ID
> i.e. your social security number.
> - Getting an employer's ID number for myself.
> - Reporting to IRS each work session you perform that lasts longer
> than 7.5 minutes ($1.00 at the legal minimum wage of $8/hr).
> - Getting you to fill out a W-2 form indicating your number of
> exemptions etc.
> - Withholding social security and income taxes from your income.
> - Somehow knowing for sure that *you* are actually doing the work,
> not acting as a front for an illegal alien who is really doing
> the work.
> That last one is the difficult part unless you have a WebCam
> watching you as you work or you travel to Sunnyvale and I
> personally watch you do the work. It ain't gonna happen until and
> unless some government decides to use my system to manage
> government-funded work, and set up work centers where you must
> travel to actually perform the work, whereupon the government will
> have their own people do all those employer-overhead tasks, and pay
> me $cash$ for usage of my system.
>
..the governments of the world will hate you for it, because this is
income and services being exchanged on a tax free basis.
Before you know where you are, these credits will be getting 40%
deducted for every transaction.
And then arguing about which country is due the taxes..
>> which you indicate you eventually want to do
>
> Yeah, if and when I find a government, or maybe a large company
> with benolevant tendencies, willing to work with me. In the
> foreseeable future, expect:
> - "toy" system with only surveys/polls, for the next week or so;
> - "micro" system with only some simple service that you-all want,
> as chosen by your votes in the surveys/polls, for the next month
> or so;
> - "micro" labor-exchange with all contracts less than 7.5 minutes,
> in the foreseeable future maybe starting in December.
> If you do eighteen 440-second contracts per day, that's equivalent
> to $17.60 per day at the legal minimum wage, allowing you to
> purchase almost an equivalent value in services provided to you by
> others. Can you think of any one kind of service, or any collection
> of little bits of different services, which would add up to where
> you'd be willing to pay $17.60 per day for the services, hence
> you'd be willing to do the eighteen contracts per day to pay for
> the services you'd be getting in return?
>
Host the thing in a tax haven, and challenge govts to get their taxes.
> Honestly what I had more in mind for typical use of this system is
> that maybe ten time per day there's this question bugging you,
> something simple like what episode of a program had something
> happen, or who was that cute actress in that TV commercial about
> such-and-such, etc., and you could spend twenty minutes doing a
> Google search trying to satisfy your curiousity, but you'd rather
> spend 20 seconds typing up your question and 20 seconds submitting
> it as an RFB for anyone who can get the answer in less than 2
> minutes, and spend 20 seconds later reading the answer that comes
> back from whoever did the contract, and some other time spend two
> minutes working for somebody else who wants something that is easy
> for you, to earn that 2 minutes of labor-credits back. For example,
> I might be willing to pay 2 minutes of labor-credits to anyone who
> can answer my next PHP question promptly. Maybe that could be you.
>
Paid for version of Usenet.
Id say that people wont pay for that, but they might well pay for e.g.
someone with some software they don't have themselves, doing a bit of
work for them.
I do designs for order. Mostly I charge only for the produced items, as
a normal business transaction, but to actually sell design work and time
is useful. However the problems of customer satisfaction raise their
heads. The first customer who says 'I don't think what you did was worth
what I paid' and starts suing YOU, is the day it gets complex.
>> That doesn't work for any but toy amounts of labor credits.
>> You can't do that for enough labor credits to buy a tank of gas
>> or have your suit drycleaned or have your hair styled.
>
> Well, first there's the question of what gasoline station (I assume
> you mean liquid fuel, "petrol" or "gasoline", not a true gas) or
> drycleaner would find enough value in the kinds of services my
> system would provide that they'd be willing to somehow arrange to
> accept my system's labor credits in lieu of cash. More likely
> somebody who deals in information technology, whose time is worth a
> lot more than $8/hr, would realize the value in the services, but
> prefer to pay $8/hr for services rather than perform an hour of
> labor for an hour of services. So the some real $cash$ would be
> inserted into my system, which could then be collected in the form
> of gasoline or drycleaner gift cupons. Each cupon would be worth
> $1, and you'd collect as many as you needed to pay for the gasoline
> or drycleaning you needed. Or if you didn't have enough gift cupons
> you'd pay with a mix of cupons and real $cash$.
>
Nah. You set up a forex trading system and trade credits for currency on
the open market.
Or wait till someone else does. I never realised that when I shut down
my online gaming account with millions of game cash and a superhero
character I could have sold that for real hard cash on e-bay.
>
> (splitting my reply here, before your Bernie Madoff remarks)
:-)
I don't see that what you are doing is ultimately a lot different from a
contract labour agency. The IRS wont bother you until someone somewhere
is making serious money.
You are however highlighting an area that is real and pertinent and very
worrying for all governments and commercial enterprises. Namely
international transactions that involve no physical media crossing
national boundaries.
Once upon a time a company I part owned sold software. WE imported it,
heavy manuals and all, from the USA. Then we did a deal, and imported
merely a licence to print. This is slightly before the internet, so
disks were sent over for master copies, and we paid a per unit
printed/disk written basis. Since nothing was imported, we paid no
import taxes. The disks themselves that were imported, every update,
were of zero real value.
WE took serous legal advice, because we were making serious money. It
was at that time completely legal. The value added tax system applied to
value add..in the country of taxation. WE were adding value locally in
printing and shipping., so we paid on that, but our cost prices were way
below the competition.
These days with the internet, I can download and pay for software over
the net. Or indeed any digitally representable object of value.
For even quite large values of transaction, this is outside any tax
system. The complete decimation of the music industry, first by the
cassette tape, and then by MP3 is a lesson that has been learnt by many
industries..
You have introduced the concept of offshore working in a way it hasn't
been introduced before. IF it takes off, it will cause ripples. Or big
waves.
Personally I am of the radical opinion, that to repair the damage to the
Western economies, we should drop income tax altogether in favour of
transaction tax. That at a stroke wipes 30-50% of the cost of labour in
the West vis a vis the East - a huge competitive advantage. But of
course in your system, there is a real problem as to where the
transaction actually takes place, and who should collect tax upon it.
I take my hat off to you.
You are
- proposing a de facto international currency not bound to any reserve
currency or national economy: Something the major trading nations are
already discussing.
- proposing a task based contractual labor market, of completely
international perspective, which has to be, if it can be managed,
extraordinarily efficient.
- driving a horse and car through international exchange rates and labor
market values. Valuing the time of a person in Bangladesh the same as a
person in Seattle.
If it works, you will either get the Nobel Prize, or get shot. :-)
Get yourself some serious lawyers, some serious accountants and present
this lot to Google. I honestly believe you have a chance of making
millions. Don't tinker with software, start writing a business plan.
Oh, and be ruthlessly commercial. Yes, this ideas is truly eco in that
it could in principle take huge costs to the environment out of working.
But don't get silly and idealistic: To get this lot working will take
money, lots of it. Use the commercial world to rip the throat out of a
system that is past its sell by date. That's what we did building the
Internet. Drove a cart and horses through the system, sold a system to
the money boys that they couldn't afterwards do without.
And if you think a bunch of ex hippies and geeks didn't change the world
more than any politician ever has, just look around. WE destroyed the
monopolies on knowledge, we ripped the heart out of distribution chains
via disintermedation, and we did more to affect political systems via
the free spread of information and news, no matter how biased and
distorted it is. Its arguable sadly, as to whether Al Qaeda could have
ever become anything without the Internet. That's the downside, but the
upside is amazon, google, free software updates instantly, Linux and the
free software movement..online international TV, flash trading, global
market instability..oh yes, we made a difference all right.
Your idea is perfect. Its a proper convergent scenario. Just as cheap
comms and cheap computers opened up the internet - two different areas
brought together, you have the power and speed of instant transaction
and global reach of those transactions coupled to a crisis in economies,
and a need to transition to lower cost labor, and the availability of
people with skills of value, but who are not otherwise employed.
Private equity's wet dream.
Jerry Stuckle
>>>> credits on your site as opposed to other forms of currency,
>>> Because these labor credits are available any time you want to
>>> spend a few minutes to earn them, unlike money which you can't just
>>> **get** any time you want to work for it,
>
>> From: gor...@hammy.burditt.org (Gordon Burditt)
>> "Because it's convenient" is not a good reason to trust anyone.
>
> OK, maybe I didn't phrase that very well. The trouble with regular
> currency is that in general you can't just **get** it any time you
> want.
Jobs are there for *qualified* people. Go flip burgers at the local
fast food restaurant, for instance.
But no, you can't get a paying job doing something (like program design)
which you are totally unqualified for. There are many people who are
qualified. Same with programming.
And just saying you can do it doesn't make it a fact. You've already
proven here you have no idea what you're doing.
<snipping another huge amount of bullshit>
The Natural Philosopher
> Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t wrote:
>>>>> One problem I have here is: Why should someone trust labor
>>>>> credits on your site as opposed to other forms of currency,
>>>> Because these labor credits are available any time you want to
>>>> spend a few minutes to earn them, unlike money which you can't just
>>>> **get** any time you want to work for it,
>>
>>> From: gor...@hammy.burditt.org (Gordon Burditt)
>>> "Because it's convenient" is not a good reason to trust anyone.
>>
>> OK, maybe I didn't phrase that very well. The trouble with regular
>> currency is that in general you can't just **get** it any time you
>> want.
>
> Jobs are there for *qualified* people. Go flip burgers at the local
> fast food restaurant, for instance.
>
> But no, you can't get a paying job doing something (like program design)
> which you are totally unqualified for. There are many people who are
> qualified. Same with programming.
>
Is that why you have so much time to spend being an arsehole here,
thenJerry?
Cant get a proper job?
> And just saying you can do it doesn't make it a fact. You've already
> proven here you have no idea what you're doing.
>
No, Jerry, that's your specialty. All mouth and no trousers.
Jerry Stuckle
> Jerry Stuckle wrote:
>> Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t wrote:
>>>>>> One problem I have here is: Why should someone trust labor
>>>>>> credits on your site as opposed to other forms of currency,
>>>>> Because these labor credits are available any time you want to
>>>>> spend a few minutes to earn them, unlike money which you can't just
>>>>> **get** any time you want to work for it,
>>>
>>>> From: gor...@hammy.burditt.org (Gordon Burditt)
>>>> "Because it's convenient" is not a good reason to trust anyone.
>>>
>>> OK, maybe I didn't phrase that very well. The trouble with regular
>>> currency is that in general you can't just **get** it any time you
>>> want.
>>
>> Jobs are there for *qualified* people. Go flip burgers at the local
>> fast food restaurant, for instance.
>>
>> But no, you can't get a paying job doing something (like program
>> design) which you are totally unqualified for. There are many people
>> who are qualified. Same with programming.
>>
>
> Is that why you have so much time to spend being an arsehole here,
> thenJerry?
>
> Cant get a proper job?
>
Unlike you, I've got plenty of work - enough so that I can afford to
spend some time here.
>
>> And just saying you can do it doesn't make it a fact. You've already
>> proven here you have no idea what you're doing.
>>
>
> No, Jerry, that's your specialty. All mouth and no trousers.
>
>
ROFLMAO! People here know who's full of shit. Trolls like you can't
fool them.
Go back to your ditch digging. Maybe your mommy will show you which end
of the shovel to use!
The Natural Philosopher
I do like caring sensitive people, don't you?
Gordon Burditt
>> >> credits on your site as opposed to other forms of currency,
>> >Because these labor credits are available any time you want to
>> >spend a few minutes to earn them, unlike money which you can't just
>> >**get** any time you want to work for it,
Have you ever heard of collecting recyclable materials and selling
them? It certainly doesn't pay well, but some of the homeless
manage to earn some money (dollars) doing it. There are not huge
startup costs for this: you don't have to buy a truck. Others get
dollars by begging.
>> From: gor...@hammy.burditt.org (Gordon Burditt)
>> "Because it's convenient" is not a good reason to trust anyone.
>
>OK, maybe I didn't phrase that very well. The trouble with regular
>currency is that in general you can't just **get** it any time you
>want.
The attributes I want in currency are:
(1) I can exchange it for things I want. Most merchants accept it.
That particularly includes things I often need and expect to
need again: food, shelter, clothing, transportation, utilities,
medical care. And those nasty things I'm stuck with: taxes.
(2) It acts as a reliable store of value for future exchanges.
This is probably the most difficult to get right.
(The dollar isn't doing so well in this regard. Scams like
Bernie Madoff investments are even worse. So were other currencies
in hyperinflationary periods.)
(3) I can easily exchange large amounts or small amounts of currency.
Transaction fees are low compared to the amount of the transaction.
Electronic transfers with a very small minimum unit of currency
are nice here.
(4) Currency should be transportable. You shouldn't have to carry 200
pounds of coins to buy lunch. Electronic transfers make this nice.
The attribute of "*ANYONE ELSE* can obtain some any time they want
it" sounds like it is a BAD attribute for a currency because of
inflation problems. This is an even worse problem if the person
handing out labor credits says he gets nothing of value in return
for people solving Turing test puzzles.
Your labor credits fail (1) because at the moment, no one but you
will accept them for anything.
Your labor credits fail (2) because the creator of it doesn't think
it needs something to back up the currency, even if it's "the full
faith and credit of the United States", rather than something
substantial like gold.
Your labor credits fail (3) because of the ludicrous low limits on
transaction sizes.
Your labor credits are somewhat shaky on point (4) because they can
only be transferred at one web site with no claims of backup,
although that might still work out better than having to use a
pocket full of quarters to pay your rent.
Incidentally, one thing I haven't heard anything about yet is the
ability of two people who are members of your site to transfer
payments of labor credits from one to the other (presumably in
exchange for something of value, but you don't have to verify that).
Think "checking account denominated in labor credits". How much
does this cost to accomplish (script time if that's what you are/will
charge for such a service)?
>There isn't any work place where you can just walk in off the
>street any time you need money and start to work and earn as much
>money as you might want and then quit and take home your money, no
>strings attached. Since you can't get money in the first place, the
>whole question of trusting it is moot to begin with.
If anyone can do that, why would they ever want to trade something
valuable for *MY* labor credits?
I've got an even better proposal for a currency: urine. You make
it yourself, automatically. There is a bit of a problem that nobody
else wants it, though. And storing and carrying around large quantities
of it can be awkward.
>So their universal availablity,
AKA hyperinflation.
>So that leaves the question, why trust labor credits (ignoring
>comparing them with other non-available currencies)?
You seem to think that it's an *advantage* of labor credits that
I can earn them any time I want, but I *cannot* exchange them for
dollars. I disagree. And if labor credits can be exchanged for
dollars, then your argument about dollars being unobtainable goes
out the window.
>That's the result of a "scientific/consumer" experiment:
I don't invest in something as an experiment to see if it's
trustworthy. Trust has to be established first. To some extent,
that's "let the other suckers go first".
>First you spend a few seconds of your time earning labor credits.
>Then you try spending some of them and see if you get anything
>of value for them.
Right now I'm having problems imagining why I would want to pay
money to bias the results of surveys, which seems to be the only
thing I can use them for at the moment.
Where would an unemployed person (who, for a while at least, gets
dollars in unemployment insurance, so don't say dollars are
unavailable) exchange labor credits for the things he needs: food.
shelter. clothing. medical care. transportation. Perhaps even
computer access, to look for a job (can be obtained at libraries
free).
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> >Those weren't actually investments.
> They were represented to people as investments.
Yes. Bernie said he was investing the money in stock, but he faked
all the transactions after-the-fact, pretending he day-traded to
buy low and sell high, back-dated to look as if he really knew a
low-priced stock was going to go up later the same day, and as if
he used that predictive ability to really buy low and sell high,
when fact he used later investor's money to fill in the fact that
he couldn't predict the low-high swings so in fact did *not* invest
money when the stock was low just before it went up.
What puzzles me is how he managed to fake the transactions for so
long without anyone at the SEC fact-checking those transaction
claims and seeing that in fact he did *not* buy the stock at low
prices as claimed and also did *not* later sell high as claimed.
All official stock trades through the NYSE go out on the official
ticker in almost real-time, shown to paid subscribers immediately
upon ticker-post (except with delay if there's heavy trading
causing the ticker to be behind real-time by a few minutes),
released to the general public through TV networks and Web sites a
few minutes later, and are permanently archived in multiple
locations that are accessible for free or near free. So it should
have been *trivial* for the SEC (Securities and Exchange
Commission) to pick a few of Madoff's claimed trades at random and
check if they were real, and if not real then haul him into jail
already ten or twenty years ago when he first started fabricating
his day-trades, or at least when the Web got well enough developed
that search engines for NYSE ticker archives would be available.
> You're representing that I can earn labor credits NOW and then
> use them later.
But at present the only solid claim about usages I offer are:
- They automatically pay the cost of PHP/MySQL script-runs on my
service, which average 10-20 milliseconds each, and as of a
couple days ago are capped at 100 milliseconds even when take
longer. Since a single Turing question gives you 4-10 seconds of
credit, that guarantees you at least 40-100 PHP-MySQL script
runs, with hope for five or ten times as many if you are lucky,
so after answering just one Turing question you can totally
explore the current site to get a feeling for what else you can
use your labor-credits to pay for, thus in that sense full
disclosure for just the cost of some of your time to answer one
missing-word question and then browse the site.
- You can *deposit* (not *pay*) your labor-credits to establish a
stake in the toplevel meta-survey question, namely which survey
question would you most like to be available for you to vote in.
Specifically you can nominate a new survey question for just the
cost of the appx. five script-runs needed to navigate that part
of the site. And once a survey question has been approved as an
answer to the "what survey" meta-question, you can then
*deposit* labor credits to your favorite survey you'd like to
have installed later, with no *pay*ment except the script-run
time as usual. So for example you can spend appx. five
script-runs (at most half a second) to nominate a survey, then
come back a few days later and spend another appx. five script
runs (another half a second) to deposit up to nearly ten seconds
of your labor-credit into that survey you previously nominated.
(Turing tests can be run only when your balance is below 10
seconds, and can at most boost you up to 15 seconds, and when
you invest in survey answers you are not allowed to deplete your
account below 5 seconds, so the most you can deposit in one
transaction from Turing funds alone is 15 minus 5 i.e. 10 seconds.)
- At any time you can withdraw any portion of your funds (except
the very last millisecond) from any meta-survey answer and
either keep them in your main account or re-deposit in some
*other* meta-survey answer.
- At some time in the future there may be other ways to spend your
labor credits, in particular if enough people show interest I
plan to implement additional surveys in addition to the toplevel
meta-survey, so that you'll be able to invest not just in
expressing your preference for which survey, but actually
express your preference *in* one of those popular surveys, such
as what features you'd like me to implement, or maybe some other
survey you-all would find more pleasure in expressing a
preference in, such as what we should do in Afghanistan, or your
favorite StarTrek episode, or what music you'd like to win the
KDFC 102.1 FM yearly classical-music contest, etc. Also I almost
surely will be implementing fixed-time contracts with a whole
bidding system, and in that context I'll be personally offering
labor-credits (from the master account, also known as "the
kitty", which is where all your up-to-100-milliseconds per
script-run actually get transferred) to anyone who can answer
specific questions for *me* within a reasonable time
(a couple minutes at most for the easy questions, maybe as
much as five minutes for the more challenging questions or
for answering software questions such as the kinds I've been
posting to comp.lang.php recently).
But at the moment the above (first three bullet points) is full
disclosure how you may spend labor credits that were given to
you merely for filling in a missing word in some English
language text to prove you aren't a spambot, namely script-run
overhead (payment to "the kitty") and meta-survey preferences
(deposit which you may withdraw later for other use).
If you believe my disclosure is in any way dishonest, whereby you
could compare my claim to Madoff's blatant lies, please speak now.
Otherwise, please admit that your comparison of me to Madoff is
totally off the wall and a mistaken fear on your part. (You didn't
say I'm like Madoff, so you didn't commit libel, but you *did*
express *fear* of my being dishonest, so I hope now you have enough
information to know whether I'm lying or not and can stop sitting
on the worry-fence.)
> How is that different?
Bernie fucking lied. I am providing full *honest* disclosure,
unless you can find something wrong with my disclosure.
> The only difference seems to be is that you do it in such small
> quantities that it's completely useless.
No, at *that* point you *are* committing libel! I am most
definitely not lying about what my labor-credits can be used for,
in attempt to defraud people, so there is no similarity in that
sense to what Bernie Madoff did.
> Such small quantities of labor are difficult to sell, anyway,
> unless they can be done over the web.
Yup, that's the whole point of my Web site, I'm doing over the Web.
Doh!!
> If I want someone to do some labor for me, say, mowing my lawn,
> cutting my hair, sewing a button on a shirt, etc., we have to get
> together at the same place and that transportation cost (even if we
> live on the same block) swamps the tiny balance limit you have on
> labor credits.
Yup. I know my market, little snippets of service, that can be done
quickly over web, lasting less than 7.5 minutes each, with very
little set-up overhead. At this time I make no claim to be able to
handle, through my Web site, contracting for real-world services.
But if and when I get a real-world financial sponsor, such as the
City of Sunnyvale wishing to provide work for homeless people in
the city to perform, in return for minimum wage of $8/hr, but
instead of paying these people directly they feed the money through
my NewEco, so that the work done compared to the payment received
can be indirect, such as one person doing physical labor of mowing
somebody's lawn, getting labor credits for that work, using those
labor credits to pay somebody else to get information for them over
the InterNet, and then that *other* person cashing out the labor
credits to receive CityOfSunnyvale $funds$ ... you can finish the
thought, right?
> You made a claim at one point that unemployed people would
> actually be able to earn a living with labor credits.
Show me where I said that, cite Message-ID or Google Groups URL,
and I'll look at the context and my precise wording and try to
figure out what I was talking about and what I meant, and I'll
clarify it to you. I might have been talking about *after* I get
government funding to feed a sort of WPA/CCC through my system, or
I might have been talking about some company such as Target or
Safeway donating a few $5 gift-cards to my system which can be
cashed-out by the first person to accumulate more than $5 of labor
credits *not* from Turing questions but from useful labor by
contract, or I might have been talking about my proposed job-ad
filtering service which will make it much more efficient for
unemployed people to find job opportunities they quailfy for so
that they have more of their time free to do actual paying work
without that work preventing them from finding a regular job, or I
might have been talking about the possibilty that *I* might
personally invest some of my own SSI money into NewEco which peopld
could then "cash out" if they can show they are residents of
Sunnyvale and needy enough to may personal satisfaction. There are
so many things I *might* have said that you need to show me the
context of my statement before I can explain it to you.
> That means accumulating enough credits to, say, pay a month of
> rent.
No, that's not at all necessary. Accumulate $5, and cash-out.
Accumulate $5, and cash-out. Accumulate $5, and cash-out.
Accumulate $5, and cash-out. Accumulate $5, and cash-out.
Accumulate $5, and cash-out. Accumulate $5, and cash-out.
Accumulate $5, and cash-out. Accumulate $5, and cash-out.
Accumulate $5, and cash-out. Accumulate $5, and cash-out.
Accumulate $5, and cash-out. Accumulate $5, and cash-out.
Accumulate $5, and cash-out. Accumulate $5, and cash-out.
Accumulate $5, and cash-out. Accumulate $5, and cash-out.
Accumulate $5, and cash-out. Accumulate $5, and cash-out.
Accumulate $5, and cash-out. You now have $100 cash. Repeat that as
many times as necessary to pay the month's rent. But that can be
done *only* after I get a sponsor to provide $cash$ in return for
labor. One possibility is that EDD (Employment Development
Department, the totally crappy/worthless government-run employment
service of the State of California, except that they handle
unemployment benefits, their *only* useful service), or the
Department of Rehabilitation (another state agency that is supposed
to help disabled people find employment, but again they are almost
totally useless, although they *did* finally pay for me to attend
computer-programming classes *only* after Focus for Work
recommended me to them, after they previously turned me down for
services several times when I applied directly or through
Alliance), or Focus for Work (part of Catholic Charities), or
Project Hired (independent agency), or Alliance (merger of several
formerly independent agencies), or Silicon Valley Independent
Living Center (independent), or Grace Community Center (funded by
City of San Jose), might discover that my job-filtering service is
so very valuable that they pay me $cash$ to use it massively on
behalf of their clients looking for regular employment. Then I can
use that $cash$ to pay people who are qualified to "cash out" their
labor credits by their special needs.
> Or buy a suit. Or buy a bus pass good for a month.
Ditto.
> When you've got your site going to handle quantities this, why
> should I trust you?
Trust me for the $5 you accumulate each time before you "cash out",
worried that after I've allowed you to "cash out" $5 each of a
hundred times already, the *next* time you try to cash out you'll
learn the Web site has disappeared and I've flown to South America
out of range of your $5 lawsuit in small claims court??
You're worrying about gnats!!!
> If what they want *COSTS* years of labor (e.g. college tuition),
> how do they avoid this?
They treat my system as a part-time job, except they can do it any
spare moment rather than having to schedule classes to avoid
conflict with when the boss needs you at work to handle lunch load
at MacDonalds or dinner load at Marie Calenders or Sunday-evening
rush at Target etc. And the other difference is that instead of
getting paid only once every two weeks, you get paid $5 each time
you reach that level of labor-credit, which can be several times
per day, transferred to your regular bank-checking account, which
is FDIC insured, and then you can write cheques on that account.
(Again this is *only* after I get some $financial$ sponsor, either a
state or charity organization, or users like Jerry Stuckle who
would be glad to hire people at minimum wage instead of spending
his $90/hr time doing the same work. He works one hour, gets $90,
and uses that to pay for eleven hours of labor plus $2 of
script-run time to "the kitty". For example he might be willing to
pay $2 to have his groceries delivered to his home so he doesn't
have to spend an hour of his $90/hr time making a grocery trip.)
> >I just ask that people spend a few minutes of labor and then
> >immediately use their labor credits to post Requests for Bids
> >(RFBs) offering to hire others to work for them to provide some
> >small services they'd like to receive.
> Scammers use this method to suck people in, then take them big time.
One big difference is that they are asking people to hand over
cash, whereas I'm only asking people to spend their *time* on my
system.
> Bernie Madoff likely started people with moderate investments at
> first. That you're trustworthy with pennies doesn't prove that
> you're trustworthy with thousands of dollars.
Yup. But trustworthy with pennies *does* give reason to take a
chance on dimes, and a proven trustworthy record with dimes *does*
give reason to take a chance on dollars, likewise tens of dollars
which is already beyond the trust I *ever* would ask, with $6 being
the absolute cap on account balance.
(snipped details of 440-second limit on single transactions and
2700-second limit on account balance)
> So you're saying it's a toy system and will stay a toy system.
No, it's a piecemeal system. Turnaround is less than one dollar per
earning event, less than six dollars per cash-out event, but
hundreds of such tiny events can add up over time. Think of a
dripping faucet, where one drop, or even ten drops, is no big deal,
but one drop every five seconds endlessly will flood your apartment
and ruin your rug in a couple weeks. This is the opposite,
raindrops of funds that fill a huge reservoir over time, just that
the storage capacity of NewEco is only one teaspoonful per user, so
you have to move one teaspoon at a time to your regular FDIC
insured bank account which has a reservoir capacity of $250,000.
> Are you sure the IRS isn't interested in wages over a dollar
> *ACCUMULATED OVER A WHOLE YEAR*?
I don't at all mind reporting the yearly totals once a year, if
they ever amount to more than $10 per person, or whatever the IRS
threshold is.
(Do you happen to know the yearly threshold for a cooperative such
as WikiPedia to be required to total up the contributions by each
editor and estimate their dollar value and report them to IRS?)
What I would find onerous is if I have to report every single
transaction, by printing a form at the cost of $.10 per page, and
paying $.43 cents postage per ounce (5 pages), i.e. a prorated cost
of $.19 per transaction, nevermind my **labor** taking public
transit to Kinko's for the printing and then stuffing envelopes
manually, such a batch of postage every single day, which would
cost me more than my **total** income from SSI, and leave me
totally exhausted from the daily public-transit trips an hour each
way to/from Kinko's, nevermind that my SSI income is already half
spent on rent and half obligated to pay back credit-card debt until
I'm 79 years old when I'll finally be out of debt if I live that
long and SSI continues to pay that long and my current low-income
housing continues to operate that long. Can you imagine if I have a
million users, making 50 transactions each per day, so I have to
pay the cost of printing 50 million pieces of paper per day, at ten
cents per page, and the postage, and the labor to stuff those
envelopes, ... well actually I can probably fit about ten itemized
transactions per printed page, so that is only five million pieces
of paper printed per day, still can you imagine my having to do
that???
Keeping each transaction under $1 means I won't have to report each
single transaction itemized individually to the IRS on a daily
basis. One report per year listing my million customers in summary
form only, ten customers per page, total 100,000 printed pages, and
maybe the IRS would accept all the data on a diskette instead if I
hand-deliver to the local IRS office, or just the hundred thousand
users who are above the IRS yearly reporting threshold, would be
less of a pain than daily itemized reporting. Hmmm, would it fit on
an 800k diskette? 100,000 customers, each needing about 200
characters to list name address SSN and dollar amount, total 20
megabytes, no won't fit on one 800k diskette, but would fit on a
stack of 12 or 13 diskettes I could carry in my backpack on public
transit, or on a USB flashdrive memory stick if they accept those.
So once a year I would run a PHP/MySQL script that would generate
yearly totals on a per-user basis and ignore those under the IRS
threshold and write those over the threshold to a 20-MB disk file,
then I'd use FTP to move that to my shell account to make sure it
was available, then go to a semi-public computer lab to FTP that to
the MS-Windows computer, then stick in my USB flashdrive and copy
to there, then go catch the next bus to IRS office.
Actually it would be more fun to use my textedit-to-FAX software
and FAX modem to send all ten thousand pages of the report to the
FAX machine at the local IRS office. GIven that only one or two of
those hundred thousand people being reported has enough total
income that my extra little bit of their income pushes them up to
pay a little bit more income taxes, I'm sure the IRS will love
receiving my report and needing to hire extra staff to manually
enter the data from FAX paper into their database to try to find
the needle of tax obligations of people who actually earn a real
living through NewEco among the haystack of unemployed people whose
total income for the year is SSI plus an extra five dollars from
NewEco. (Nevermind also needing to hire extra staff to keep the FAX
machine full of paper.)
But even the yearly reporting might not be necessary for a vast
majority of my users who are currently unemployed and have *never*
personally operated a computer-consulting business, hence *none* of
their barter income can be considered in lieu of real money, hence
*none* of their barters need ever be reported to IRS, because the
IRS rule is that only if you are running a commercial business
where you normally make a profit selling products and/or services,
if you receive payment for those *same* kinds of services in the
form of barter instead of cash, then it counts as if you had
received cash, and has to be reported. If you're selling some
service unrelated to your ordinary business or professional work,
or if you don't have any profitable business nor paying work to
begin with, then none of your barter is taxable income and none has
to be reported to IRS. For example, I've been unable to get any pay
for my software programming work since 1991 (except a couple weeks
in 1992), and Jerry Stuckle says my labor writing software is
worthless, so there's no way the IRS can claim that I'm a
professional software engineer, and I have *never* in my whole life
gotten any income from Web services, so any software or Web design
I do can't possibly be what I normally do for a living any time
since 1991, so none of what I receive as labor exchange for such
worthless non-professional work can be taxed by the IRS as barter
income to supplement what I ordinarily receive as cash. Maybe
Jerry's repeated claims that my labor is worthless is to my
advantage when dealing with the IRS about my barter exchanges?
Jerry Stuckle
Too bad. Now I guess you've got no one to show you which end of the
shovel to use.
The Natural Philosopher
certainly isn't now.
Jerry Stuckle
Nope, I have absolutely no sympathy for trolls such as you.
Real people I do care about.
The Natural Philosopher
has never posted a line of code, is pretty rich.
People don't believe you any more Jerry. The emperor has no clothes.
Jerry Stuckle
ROFLMAO! This claim is proof that you're no programmer. You've already
proven you're not the "engineer" you claim to be!
> People don't believe you any more Jerry. The emperor has no clothes.
>
>
>
ROFLMAO! So you're running around naked? Oh wait - you're only an
emperor in your own mind.
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> Real people I do care about.
So now you're claiming I'm not a real person. If I'm not a real
person, then I must be an A.I. program far beyond the current state
of art, so advanced that you must crave to meet my programmer so
that you can personally shake his hand before you nominate him for
a Nobel prize? Is that what you're claiming and wishing? You hope
that by attacking this A.I. program several times a day, you will
somehow provoke my programmer to show his face etc.?
Jerry Stuckle
I was not talking about you.
You really can't read and comprehend, can you? Either that or you're so
full of yourself you think the whole world revolves around you.
What a loser.
The Natural Philosopher
> so
> full of yourself you think the whole world revolves around you.
>
> What a loser.
>
Bwhahaha!
Dang it Jerry, get out of that hall of mirrors before I die laughing.
Jerry Stuckle
Not taking your medication again?
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> There's nothing wrong with "stockpiling" funds for later.
> If I have an emergency down the line with tight funds (car
> trouble, health problems, etc.), a savings account can be a great
> help.
But only in a government-insured bank account, or in a private safe that
is well guarded. Anything more speculative such as stock market is
IMO not necessarily going to be there when you need it.
In particular, I'm not going to allow any of my NewEco users to
accumulate more than 45 minutes of labor credit at any one time.
Anyone getting close to that limit needs to either spand the
labor credits to get services, or $cash$ out if that user is
qualified for any particular class of $cash$ currently in the system.
(And until I find a business partner, there will be *no* $cash$
whatsoever in the system except perhaps amounts less than a dollar
that I contribute myself to "stimulate" my new economy.)
> The situation isn't as much a Catch-22 as you make it out to be.
> Even if you come fresh out of school and are unable to find your
> ideal job, you can still try things like Craigslist
I tried Craigslist but didn't qualify for any jobs that were
listed. Perhaps you can coach me how to use Craigslist more
effectively?
> or look up local small businesses.
I don't have the emotional energy to make even one cold-call much
less all ten thousand businesses in the San Jose to Palo Alto area.
I wouldn't know where to begin talking to a telephone receptionist
trying to convince her to put me in touch with somebody who will
hire me right in the middle of the greatest recession since the
1930's. Maybe you can coach me on that too?
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> First off, I havent ben following this thread, but in an idle
> moment IO read this post.
> Oh, this is a revolutionary idea. It WILL happen. If its not
> you, someone else will do it. However...
Just to be clear, it's not a French Revolution type where heads are
removed from bodies, nor a Russian Revolution either. It's not even
a MicroSoft style market-share takeover where underhanded, even
fraudulent and illegal, techniques were used. It'll be more like a
Wal-Mart or Fry's Electronics takeover of market share, if it
succeeds. Like how Khrushchev thought Communism would "bury"
Capitalism, except he was mistaken. You're just about the only
person other than myself who believes my idea is headed to
potentially turn out to be more like Fry's/WalMart rather than
Khrushchev. So thanks for the good words. Please do create an
account on http://TinyURL.Com/Portl1 and log in and do at least one
"Turing" question to get over the 6-second (labor-credit) threshold
for participating in surveys (polls), and then please do deposit
some of your labor credits into your favorite answer to the
toplevel meta-survey question, or nominate a new answer and then
come back a day or so later after I've approved it to deposit labor
credits into it.
(But I hope you'll choose:
Question#1 [S.questions] = [All survey questions]
Answer#1: {Features}
-line: {What features would you most like installed in NewEco?}
-fullDescr: {The more investment users make in expressing preference
for a particular feature, the more likely the NewEco-master will
implement it.}
and deposit at least five seconds of labor-credit into it, which
will give me a feeling like maybe it'll be worth my time to write
the rest of the code to elevate a meta-survey answer to the level
of a full survey itself.)
Then let me know if you had any problems using my system other than
new-user unfamiliarity.
> ..the governments of the world will hate you for it, because this is
> income and services being exchanged on a tax free basis.
Except that for the most part only people unable to get a paying
job, because their labors are deemed worthless to private industry,
will participate in my system, so before the government can tax us
and have it stand up in court, they need to somehow prove in court
that our services we're trading are actually worth anything, much
less as much as they are claiming them to be, and as I see it the
government would need to **hire** us to provide these same kinds of
services, paying us at least $8/hr for such labors, and then at
that point we'd be glad to file income taxes for whatever payment
the government provides us, except most likely they won't pay us
enough to put us above the standard deduction, so we won't pay any
taxes even then.
Now if my new economy gets so popular that people quit their paying
jobs to join my system instead, like if I really do "bury"
capitalism all the way not just partway, I'll have to re-ananalyze
the tax situation.
> Before you know where you are, these credits will be getting 40%
> deducted for every transaction.
That's clearly illegal to charge us 40% income tax when we're still
below the standard deduction each year.
> And then arguing about which country is due the taxes..
Probably whichever server hosts the Web application.
Currently my primary server and development server and backup
server are all in the USA, so I guess the USA gets tax rights if we
ever make enough money to get above standard deduction for income
tax purposes.
> Host the thing in a tax haven, and challenge govts to get their taxes.
Can you recommend any free PHP/MySQL hosting service in such a place?
> > ... For example, I might be willing to pay 2 minutes of
> > labor-credits to anyone who can answer my next PHP question promptly.
> > Maybe that could be you.
> Paid for version of Usenet.
Yeah. The main value-added would be accountability. If somebody
gives a good answer, they get paid. If they give crap, they don't
get paid. So there's more incentive to give good answers and be
less like some of the trolls on Usenet.
By the way, a few months ago I tried ChaCha, the cell-phone
text-message question-answering service, using somebody else's
cell-phone where text messages were enabled and free, and found the
answers to be pretty much worthless. I'll be setting up something
similar in purpose but with accountability for quality answers.
> Id say that people wont pay for that, but they might well pay for
> e.g. someone with some software they don't have themselves, doing a
> bit of work for them.
In TinyURL.Com/MayProj I've proposed quite a bit of "new software
nobody else has". Some of the ideas are kinds never before
implemented, while others are better versions of what was
previously done badly. Consider for example a company with e-mail
customer support, which has to pay $cash$ to everyone who filters
the incoming messages, many of them spam, but my proposed
TinyURL.Com/RevTre might provide a cheaper and more effective way
to manage the incoming messages.
> I do designs for order.
Designs of what? How do you find customers?
> ... You set up a forex trading system and trade credits for
> currency on the open market.
I'll let somebody else do that if they want to. But in the USA
there may be a legal problem if labor credits trade at less than
the legal minimum wage of $8/hr.
> Or wait till someone else does.
Yup. Let them hassle with the minimum-wage law.
> I never realised that when I shut down my online gaming account
> with millions of game cash and a superhero character I could have
> sold that for real hard cash on e-bay.
Why did you shut it down? Couldn't it run all by itself indefinitely?
> I don't see that what you are doing is ultimately a lot different
> from a contract labour agency.
Except that I'm going to be managing instant casual piece-work
rather than several hours minimum per contract. (Once I went to
such an agency to get help moving large furniture etc. from our
apartment to storage, and they had a rule of four hours minimum,
with my choice whether to hire one person for full amount or two
persons for half each, and because one person by himself can't
reasonably carry a full-size sofa or 100-pound solid-wood bookcase
around a corner through a doorway and down a zigzag stairway I
opted for two people splitting the hours, and they finished early
and got paid for the full contract time.)
> The IRS wont bother you until someone somewhere is making serious
> money.
In the foreseeable future, there will be no $money$ whatsoever
involved here, except for the $20/month I pay for InterNet access
so that I can build and manage the Web site.
> You have introduced the concept of offshore working in a way it
> hasn't been introduced before. IF it takes off, it will cause
> ripples. Or big waves.
Yeah, *if* it takes off. Currently I'm trying to find out what
anyone would want me to implement, among the possibilities I've
suggested in TinyURL.Com/NewEco and TinyURL.Com/MayProj, anything
they would be super-glad if I implemented, or I'm just using my own
mental guesswork as to what the hypothetical customer/user *might*
appreciate if it already existed, but so-far nary any useful
feedback from potential/actual users, so I'm adrift among ideas
what to implement with no assurance or confidence that any work I
put into the system will really be appreciated by anyone, except
for your general "revolutionary idea" approval. Google made it big
by making a search engine slightly better than its predecessors
(Lycos, Web Crawler, World Wide Web Worm, CUI W3 Catalog, Harvest
Broker, RBSE's URL database, InfoSeek, babyOIL, Open Text Web
Index, AltaVista, Magellan, Savvy Search, Yahoo, etc.)
and then all their other services follow by relation to that one
big popular application. I'm trying to find the analagous "killer
appliation" for NewEco, the service that people really like and
would be glad to pay for not by $cash$ or pop-up/banner
advertisents but by doing some labor to earn labor-credits. Would
people most want my proposed job-ad filtering service, which was
one of the major starting points for this whole idea a year ago? Or
a better romantic matchmaking service? Or a way to validate leaked
information about "underground" movements in Iran and China? Or
what?
> Personally I am of the radical opinion, that to repair the damage
> to the Western economies, we should drop income tax altogether in
> favour of transaction tax.
There's a problem defining what exactly constitutes a
"transaction". If you deposit money in the bank then immediately
withdraw it, putting you right back where you started, do you have
to pay a tax on each of those two transactions? If a large company
moves inventory from one warehouse to another, in addition to the
cost of shipping, does it also need to pay for the "transaction" of
updating the inventory database to show the new location of the
inventory? If a child walks to school, and the teacher at school
calls attendance and the child acknowledges presence in the
classroom, is the transaction of registering the child as at school
rather than at home or en route taxable? If a person inhales air
with oxygen then exhales carbon dioxide with air, is that a taxable
transaction?
> I take my hat off to you.
OK, I thank you for another compliment.
> You are
> - proposing a de facto international currency not bound to any
> reserve currency or national economy: Something the major trading
> nations are already discussing.
Yeah, I'm proposing a new "gold" standard except that unlike gold
labor-time is a more "honest" basis for judging value, because
"gold" is scarse and can be speculated into price bubbles, such as
at current when it reached a new all-time high dollar price
yesterday, but human labor available is per capita nearly a
constant for all time. The only increase in true labor value occurs
when technology makes labor more efficient/effective, allowing
existing human labor to be "leveraged" to greater productive value.
For example, a human using a computerized windows
keyboard-and-mouse text editor can create software more effectively
than somebody could with a keypunch, even ignoring the better (more
expressive) programming languages now compared to 1964. This
gradual improvement in technology to make labor more productive
does not lend to pricing inflationary bubbles the way gold prices
do.
Note that the way bids on contract work, I am *not* lowering
everyone to minimum wage. Whenever there's a scarcity in skilled
labor for a given task, such that only one or two laborers are
available to bid on any particular contract, they can bid a lot
more time than the task will really take them, and due to lack of
any competition can still be lowest bidder at that inflated price,
and thus get paid minimum-wage equivalent for more time then they
actually spend to complete the task, and thus get paid higher than
minimum wage for the actual time they took to complete the task.
But such expensive laborers can not compete for other jobs where
there's an abundance of skilled-enough unemployed desperate
laborers available to bid the price down to the shortest time in
which any such person can complete it. Thus on a per-task basis my
system will automatically balance supply (of labor) and demand (for
services) to achieve the immediately-optimum price.
> - proposing a task based contractual labor market, of completely
> international perspective, which has to be, if it can be managed,
> extraordinarily efficient.
Yes. Typical PHP/MySQL server time is around 10-20 milliseconds,
i.e. equivalent minimum wage of $8/hr it would cost $0.00004 per
Web-site transaction, with about five or ten Web-site transactions
needed for each economic transaction such as posting a RFB or
responding with a bid or confirming lowest big or submitting
completed work etc., thus if we estimate a total of about a hundred
such Web-site transactions for the entire process of posting a RFB
through completing the work, that's still only $0.004 total, less
than half a cent for the entire contract process, assuming the work
is satisfactory and the employer agrees so without dispute.
In effect, the PHP/MySQL script-run overhead is essentially zero
compared to the labor needed to navigate the menus to execute the
entire contract process. But the Web-site navigation can be
automated by any regular employer or employee, so then we're down
to the half-cent script-run cost plus the labor time involved in
writing up the RFD to begin with. So in the end, supervisorial
labor of writing up the specification of what work is to be done,
and checking the submitted work to see if it was correct, dominates
the cost from the employer perspective. And the actual labor doing
paying work dominates the cost from the employee perspective. The
whole system cost is nearly free compared to that supervisorial
labor time and employee labor time needed in any case.
If the employer disputes the work as being satisfactory, then it
gets more interesting, with some actual *seconds* (not
milliseconds) being paid by Reverse Tree members who look over the
RFB and the completed work to judge how well the contract was
actually completed and hence how much of the bid should really be
paid to the employee. This extra overhead is a strong incentive for
the employer and employee to work it out among themselves rather
than go to dispute arbitration, especially for very short contracts
where any third-party arbitration would dominate the cost. (But
note that my current idea is that funds for Reverse Tree
arbitration would come from "the kitty" rather than from either of
the two parties in the disputed contract. Actually my other idea is
to submit such disputes to Truth Futures market first, but then I
still need to figure out how such futures will be finally priced.
One idea is to have a debate forum, almost like a civil court
trial, where evidence is presented on both sides of the issue, and
then once everyone has explained the evidence very well, it should
be relatively easy for a judge or jury to render a verdict. But
I'll admit that I don't yet have a concrete design of how exactly
how all those pieces will be fitted together to result in contract
disputes getting resolved.
> - driving a horse and car through international exchange rates
> and labor market values. Valuing the time of a person in
> Bangladesh the same as a person in Seattle.
See what I said above about rare experts being able to bid more
than the time they actually require to complete the task, thus
effectively getting paid more than minimum wage. But it *is* true
that minimum wage will effectively be established the same
worldwide, which will be a great boon to people in Bangladesh or
Romania or Zambia. But since these people won't be qualified to
$cash$ out their labor credits, it's not clear that NewEco will
totally displace telephone customer support as a way to earn a
living in those areas. But I'm hoping that some of the charities
that are currently handing out money to local governments in Africa
for purpose of purchasing bed-nets and water-filters and vaccines,
only to discover the local government is pocketing the money
instead of actually providing for its citizens, will decide it's
better to donate their funds to NewEco with authorization to $cash$
out *only* by residents in these particular countries, and in fact
not as cash but as computer-printed serial-numbered certificates to
purchase bed-nets or vaccines etc. directly from stores in "nearby"
towns (only half a day's walk each way), thus bypassing local
government corrruption.
> If it works, you will either get the Nobel Prize, or get shot. :-)
Hmm...
> Get yourself some serious lawyers,
I have no money whatsoever for legal services of any useful kind.
> some serious accountants
I have no money whatsoever for accounting services of any useful kind.
> and present this lot to Google.
I tried to present a related idea to both Google and Yahoo a year
or so ago. Result was that one of them gave me a phone number to
leave a message but the person never called back, and the other
told me I needed to write up a complete disclosure of my invention
and mail it to them and just trust they'll be honest about not
stealing my invention.
> I honestly believe you have a chance of making millions.
Do you have any $cash$ to invest in hiring me the legal etc.
services I need? Do you know anyone in my local area who likes my
ideas well enough, or whom you can convince to like my ideas well
enough, to agree to be my business partner?
> Don't tinker with software, start writing a business plan.
The first step in writing a business plan is to identify potential
customers for something I offer. I'm stuck at that step, not making
any progress for more than 30 years since I first conceived GCD.
(splitting reply here before you start talking about environmental costs)
The Natural Philosopher
>> I honestly believe you have a chance of making millions.
>
> Do you have any $cash$ to invest in hiring me the legal etc.
Not nearly enough..
> services I need? Do you know anyone in my local area who likes my
> ideas well enough, or whom you can convince to like my ideas well
> enough, to agree to be my business partner?
>
Where IS your local area? You need a business angel.
>> Don't tinker with software, start writing a business plan.
>
> The first step in writing a business plan is to identify potential
> customers for something I offer. I'm stuck at that step, not making
> any progress for more than 30 years since I first conceived GCD.
>
Ah well.
technology had to catch up.
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> From: The Natural Philosopher <t...@invalid.invalid>
> Oh, and be ruthlessly commercial.
The primary value of my system is to people who have no money, but
have lots of spare time to donate, so they might as well get equal
time in return. My system is only "commercial" in *that* sense, of
getting stronger by means of trades of labor. For some
applications, one unit of information traded *to* the system (from
a user) can then be traded *from* the system to muiltple other
people, thus establishing a trade imbalance to benefit the system.
The "set barter" algorithm primarily will work that way.
> Yes, this idea[s] is truly eco[?] in that it could in principle
> take huge costs to the environment out of working.
That sentence doesn't seem to parse meaningfully.
> But don't get silly and idealistic: To get this lot working will
> take money, lots of it.
I don't see it that way at all. I see it taking lots of labor,
which is more abundant than money for such purposes. Case in point:
Many people spend hours per day contributing to newsgroup
discussions and WikiPedia building, but hardly anybody spends
$money$ toward the same constructive results.
> Use the commercial world to rip the throat out of a system that
> is past its sell by date.
I have no idea how to do that, or even what you mean.
> That's what we did building the Internet.
*You* (with others)?? Are you Al Gore or Jon Postel in disguise by
means of anonymous posting "handle"?
> Drove a cart and horses through the system, sold a system to the
> money boys that they couldn't afterwards do without.
You're of course speaking of something analagous to evolutionary
"arms races", where the old way was just fine until somebody
started doing things a new more efficient way, after which anyone
who didn't convert to the new more efficient way was left behind
losing market share to go extinct?
I do indeed see NewEco with its several novel features as something
that will lubricate various processes to run much more efficiently
than the "old way", forcing everyone trying to do those tasks to
join NewEco or remain so very inefficient by comparison that they
get left behind in the competition for market share. For example,
if my job-filtering service turns out to be as good as I expect,
traditional employment agencies and recruiters will all go out of
business unless they join NewEco and let the job-filtering service
do most of their matchmaking work. (Or maybe there will be no
value-added whatsoever they can add to what FilJob provides, and
they will all go out of that line of business in any case.) The
only value to the temporary-labor agencies will be to handle the
money on behalf of short-work arrangements that were bid and
accepted via NewEco, and physically supervising the temporary
employees in some cases where neither tele-operated supervision nor
self-supervision will suffice.
> And if you think a bunch of ex hippies and geeks didn't change
> the world more than any politician ever has, just look around. WE
> destroyed the monopolies on knowledge, we ripped the heart out of
> distribution chains via disintermedation, and we did more to
> affect political systems via the free spread of information and
> news, no matter how biased and distorted it is.
I'm still curious what role *you* individually had in making all
that happen, since you use the word "we" which usually means
"myself plus others".
I agree that the collective effort of various InterNet developers,
both developers of the net infrastructure itself (Usenet and
ArpaNet and BitNet, and later InterNet), and developers of
information systems and information/data collections and
organizations (including my "MaasInfo.TopIndex" circa 1991, and the
higher-level services such as the Web and search engines and Wiki
and social-networking services etc., and including the *content* of
many newsgroups and other discussion/info forums and Web pages),
has contributed both to the free flow of mostly-uncensored
information and the *perception* of freely available/distributable
information, which feed back and forth into each other to create a
positive feedack loop resulting in an "upward spiral".
> Its arguable sadly, as to whether Al Qaeda could have ever become
> anything without the Internet.
That's the down side to anonymous relay from either anonymous or
known sources. if anonymous relay were impossible, then we could
forcibly track each Al Qaeda all the way back to the local source
so quckly that Osama Bin Laden couldn't move fast enough to get out
from the locale, at which point a single military strike would have
gotten him already.
It's mostly *good* that people can post comments against their
government or other governments, likewise large companies such as
MicroSoft or Phizer, and not be immediately assassinated by that
government or company to shut up their voice of dissent.
I'm wondering if we can maintain the ability to dissent without
retribution while still being able to shut down major terrorists
such as Osama Bin Laden et al, by adopting a rule of law that it's
illegal to relay messages from such recognized terrorists to the
general public, and it's *required* to reveal the information path
upon order by the court, whereby the news company that refuses to
obey such a reveal-source order will find *all* their management
and *nearly*all* their staff in prison, forcing them to either go
completely out of business (thereby effectively solving the
problem, *that* news company will never again relay any of Osama's
messages to the public) or reveal the previous step in the info
chain whereby *that* news company gets out jail and their source
then goes *into* jail, lather rinse repeat until somebody is
willing to go to prison for the rest of their life or we find who
within Al Qaeda passed the message to a news agency.
> That's the downside, but the upside is amazon, google, free
> software updates instantly, Linux and the free software
> movement..online international TV, flash trading,
Except for Google and Linux, which I have experienced directly, all
of those I only hear of second-hand, not having any opportunity to
benefit directly, but I hear of them enough that I believe they are
real.
> global market instability.
Um, specifically what, and is this good or bad?
> Your idea is perfect.
Hmm, I think you flatter me too much there. I think my idea is very
good, but not yet perfect. I really could use some help
brainstorming some key design issues to get closer to perfection.
I'm sure there are some nasty bugs somewhere in the best of what
I've "thunk" so-far. For example, while I believe my ideas for
truth-futures market and revese-tree are essentially perfect, I
still have some problems working out the details of handling
disputes over unsatisfactory contract performance. All I have so
far is what might be called a "handwave" involving:
- truth futures market to provide immediate liquidity in contract pay
(so that for example the person who performed the contact can
*quickly* sell his/her completed contract at a small discount
in lieu of holding tight for 100% payment and thus having funds
in escroll for a very long time).
- a presentation of evidence, including subsidiary truth-futures
market on each item of evidence that isn't obviously true or
false based on official information.
- some sort of "delphi" style of resolution of the case, perhaps by
a sworn "jury" using the median algorithm, or alternately I as
"truth tzar" just by fiat make a judgement as to the truth value
of each truth-future claim after I've studied the evidence, as
if I were the judge rendering a verdict in a court trial)
(Note: The median algorithm based on a free-for-all of weighted
votes per my "survey/poll" system would probably not be a good way
to evaluate truth-value of claims, because a party to the case
could invest heavily to swamp the opposition, essentially
equivalent to Dow Chemical or other nasty big chemical bribing
judge or jury to force a favorable verdict.)
Slightly side remark: One cute (fun) idea I had was to combine a
survey/poll with a futures market: I run a survey/poll, with some
deadline (announced, or secret, or conditional) for finalization,
and in parallel I allow people to buy/sell "futures" of how that
survey will turn out at the moment of finalization (when the
deadline happens). I can imagine the free-for-all when somebody
buys a future at a low price or sells-short at a high price and
then invests heavily in the survey itself to push the value of a
survey answer up or down in order to make a profit in the futures
market on that same answer. But somebody on the opposite end of
that same futures commodity can equally invest heavily on the
opposite side, to drive the price back the other way, to defeat the
first person's attempt to manipulate the market. With an "arms
race" where each side is trying to invest to push the market in
their favor, they will both need to perform lots of labor for *my*
system in order to earn credits to invest, so I'll benefit from the
"war". Then after the "war" is over, both sides will have surplus
funds available to pruchase services and/or hire others by contract
to work for them.
> Its a proper convergent scenario. Just as cheap comms and cheap
> computers opened up the internet - two different areas brought
> together,
Yup. It also required various visions of how to direct this
technology towards general-public benefit simultaneous with private
benefit/profit. I personally played a small part from 1971
("programmed text" model applied to creating a tree of information;
similar to what Richard Stallman did independently about the same
time with "INFO" mode in EMACS, either/both of which predated
Apple's "HyperCard" for their Macintosh computers) through 1973
(GCD) and 1977-1980 (PCNET) and 1982 ("worldnet" proposals in the
INFO-NETS mailing list, including online "garage-sale auctions"
which predated eBay) and 1991 ("MaasInfo" indexes which pre-dated
Yahoo's tree-of-information which persists as dir.yahoo.com) in
conceiving ideas and partially developing them as models of what
*could* be fully developed, thus seeding the idea-base somewhat.
How many of my new ideas started a chain of memes that eventually
ended up with today's online services, vs. how many of my new ideas
were dead ends and instead somebody else independently came up with
the same idea and *that* conception led to current services, I have
no way to know. But since the MaasInfo indexes were well known in
PACS-L (a BitNet mailing list), I think the chance is good that
Yahoo derived from MaasInfo, and then after Yahoo became the "big
fish" to compete with, Yahoo led to Google (which abandoned the
tree-structure idea, sigh).
> you have the power and speed of instant transaction and global
> reach of those transactions coupled to a crisis in economies,
When I did my major conception of NewEco more than a year ago, as
the sub-prime mortage housing crisis was "hitting the fan", and
then the banking crisis followed, but immediately the government
was planning to put emergency measures into place to fix the
problem, I feared that if I didn't get things operational by last
Spring it'd be too late, everyone (except me) would be employed
again, and nobody would be willing to work for labor credits. But
the unemployment rate keeps going up, official rate about 11% and
true rate up to about 25% already, and it'll continue going up for
another two years, and meanwhile our immense national debt will be
a "bubble" to collapse when China stops buying new Treasury bonds
and allows their existing bonds to be cashed-in upon maturity, and
our government has **no**way** whatsoever to get money to pay for
ongoing expenses, causing our government to **default** on
redeeming Treasury bonds that have matured, causing the "full faith
and credit of the United States" to cease to have meaning,
producing a financial crisis worse than the one we just "got out
of" this year. Assuming all that is correct, I still have some time
before NewEco becomes moot, and in fact the importance of NewEco as
a replacement for the $dollar$ economy may become a matter of
national and personal survival.
> and a need to transition to lower cost labor,
Hmm, I was thinking more of the other end of the scale, putting to
work (for barter) all those currently unemployed people, so that
their labors will feed into benefit for humanity rather than wasted
sitting on butts hopelessly and futily expending emotional and
physical energy going through the motions of seeking employment.
The only lower-cost-labor that I envision would be that whenever
there are plenty of unemployed people willing to do a particular
kind of task at minimum US/Cal wage ($8/hr), it will no longer be
possible for already-employed people getting paid $80/hr to have a
monopoly on these tasks, so companies will shift assignment of many
of these tasks to NewEco, causing a reduction of hours that the
employees can work and get paid $80/hr for. For tasks that involve
security risk, they'll probably stick with their current over-paid
employees, but for general-purpose software modules and information
scavanging (what the miltary call "intelligence") they will shift
to NewEco, and in fact in many cases where there already *is*
existing general-purpose software to do a desired task but the
existing employees don't know about it and don't have time to
search for the software on their own time, and the employer won't
pay them $80/hr to do Web surfing to try to find the software,
instead the employer will just pay their over-paid employees to
re-invent the wheel ... but the employers will post RFB for some
NewEco person to advise them of existing software that *could* be
easily adapted to the needed/desired function, and then they'd just
purchase that software and pay their existing employee a few hours
to adapt it instead of the full wheel-reinvent hours.
Thus I see NewEco resulting in a *complete* elimination of
unemployment, but only a moderate amount of labor-cost reduction on
average. Do you disagree on the expected effect?
> and the availability of people with skills of value, but who are
> not otherwise employed.
Yes. That's my primary motivation for NewEco.
> Private equity's wet dream.
I think I'll need you to explain what that means.
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> Have you ever heard of collecting recyclable materials and
> selling them?
Yeah, it would take me 20 minutes each way by bike, plus the time
to stand in line, to reclaim 15 plastic bottles with CA CRV, which
gets me 75 cents. That works out to less than one dollar per hour.
But it's even worse because I'll be exhausted when I get back and
need to rest for a couple hours. So in effect it works out to less
than a dollar for *three*hours* expense of time.
I'll in fact do exactly that, but only when I need to bicycle that
distance anyway to shop at Lucky supermarket next door to there.
There's no way I'll work for less than a dollar per three hours
instead of spending the same time building NewEco.
And if I had to go around trying to find *new* sets of bottles to
recycle, where I might spend six hours just to find another fifteen
bottles, thus burning one full day collecting plus another half day
making the trip, it works out to only about ten cents per hour. You
gotta be kidding if you think I'll burn myself out for such low
wages.
> It certainly doesn't pay well, but some of the homeless manage to
> earn some money (dollars) doing it.
Yeah. They have *all* day to wander around looking for stuff to
recycle, no concept of anything better to do with their time, so
ten cents per hour is the best they can hope for. But for me,
building NewEco is expected to be of much more value than burning
myself out for ten cents per hour.
> The attributes I want in currency are:
> (1) I can exchange it for things I want. Most merchants accept it.
> That particularly includes things I often need and expect to
> need again: food, shelter, clothing, transportation, utilities,
> medical care. And those nasty things I'm stuck with: taxes.
Except for sales taxes and FICA etc., you only have to pay taxes if
you earn a pretty decent income, more than twice as much as I get
from SSDI + SSI currently, even more than I ever got when I was
unemployed writing computer software. Each year I got back as
income tax refund, based only on the standard deduction and tax
tables, *all* my income-tax withholding. They kept the FICA stuff
because that's flat rate. Some years I got back more income tax
than had been originally withheld because of "earned income
credit".
If you have no income, then you don't buy things, so you don't have
to pay sales taxes. If you have no earned income, then you don't
have to pay FICA etc. withholding taxes. So the idea that you
*must* earn some money in order to pay taxes is silly.
Food you can get from food banks, so you really don't need money
for food. (The local food bank actually provides more food than I
need mostly potatoes and yams and carrots and celery and onions.)
If you don't have a job, you don't need to travel to work, so you
don't need to pay for transportation. Also you can get Medicaid
etc. to pay for medical care, although it's crappy, such as no
dental care whatsoever currently, not even a yearly exam.
Lots of places have free clothing for homeless and other low-income
people.
That leaves shelter and utilties as the only valid claim you have
that you really can't get by without $money$. If you have a car,
you can live in it, so then you pay only maintenance of the car,
which is less $money$ than a regular residence. So I'll grant that
you probably need enough $income$ to pay for keeping a car to live
in, as I did for 3.5 years from early 1969 to late 1972. NewEco
can't at present or in the foreseeable future replace that
essential minimal income. But if you can get any kind of public
assistance, that ought to pay for the car maintenance. (When I
lived in my car there was no such thing available, so I lived off
my leftover graduate-school fellowship savings until it ran out,
plus some temporary paying work in 1969 and 1970 and 1971.)
> (2) It acts as a reliable store of value for future exchanges.
> This is probably the most difficult to get right.
> (The dollar isn't doing so well in this regard. Scams like
> Bernie Madoff investments are even worse. So were other currencies
> in hyperinflationary periods.)
When China stops buying new Treasury bonds, and cashes in old ones
as fast as they mature, or even earlier with small penalty, watch
the $dollar$ hit the fan!!! Whatever you own that you think is
worth money, will be worthless, because nobody will have any money
(except worthless dollar-paper) to pay you for selling anything of
value, and direct barter will be too difficult because the person
you need to buy something from won't have any need for whatever you
are trying to hawk. The economy will be pure "cash" trade with
nobody having any accumulated savings of any kind. But at least
NewEco will make it *easy* to barter indirectly using labor
credits.
> (3) I can easily exchange large amounts or small amounts of currency.
> Transaction fees are low compared to the amount of the transaction.
> Electronic transfers with a very small minimum unit of currency
> are nice here.
For NewEco, the minimum unit of currency will be one second (just
over a fifth of a penny at current $8/hr minimum wage) for
user-to-user exchanges, and one millisecond for PHP/MySQL
script-runs. All contracts will be in multiples of ten seconds,
with worst-case overhead 100 milliseconds per PHP/MySQL script-run,
for a total of about one second worst-case overhead for a contract,
so smallest contract with largest possible overhead gives about 10%
overhead, but almost always the overhead will be one or two orders
of magnitude smaller due to script-run times more like 10 ms each
and contracts more like 100 seconds or longer. Compared to the
usual 3% fee for credit-card cash advances, and $8 for a cashier's
cheque, NewEco is very low overhead.
> (4) Currency should be transportable. You shouldn't have to carry 200
> pounds of coins to buy lunch. Electronic transfers make this nice.
Yes. With NewEco on the Web, and specially tailored for the basic
functions to work even on one-inch cell-phone screens, you will be
able to conduct transactions from anywhere you'd happen to be. (You
wouldn't really want to be in a third-world country where cellphone
towers don't exist, right? Actually much of Africa is cell-phone
enabled already, in fact most people in some African countries do
most of their business and InterNet access over cell-phones.)
> The attribute of "*ANYONE ELSE* can obtain some any time they
> want it" sounds like it is a BAD attribute for a currency because
> of inflation problems.
For ordinary currency, that's true. But for labor credits, where
"can get some" means "perform so-much time labor", there's an
absolute limit on how much anyone can get in a time period, namely
24 hours per day in a burst, 18 hours per day sustained over a long
span of time. The total labor-credit supply increases as people
work for my system, getting paid from "the kitty" for their labors,
and then when everyone in the world has about the right amount of
labor-credits I can simply cease offering so many kitty-paid RFBs,
so that overhead (script-run time) gradually eats away at the
labor-credit supply. Thus I am "Chairman of the Fed" in this sense
of controlling the total amount of labor credits that are
outstanding at any time. Ideally nobody has any large accumulation
of labor-credit, but lots of labor credits are changing hands from
minute to minute, creating a lot of "liquidity" in the sense of
work available for anyone who wants to work any time they want, and
I can add such liquidity any time I want by offering some RFBs from
"the kitty".
The really nice thing about *my* "Fed" is that nobody gets loans
that need to be repaid, they only get funds for doing useful work
to build infrastructure, funds that do *not* need to be repaid, can
instead always be spent to purchase services, and nobody gets
"welfare" for just sitting on their butts looking "needy", they
have to **work** in a useful way to get paid.
The limited number of Turing questions (114 at last count) are in
fact a sort of "make work", in the sense that they don't produce
anything of value in return for the labor-credits paid to the users
answering the questions. But like I said it's just a limited amount
per user, and I actually plan to eventually terminate the Turing
question system as soon as I have a sufficient quantity of useful
RFBs posted at all times.
A more permanent type of "make work" I plan to institute
eventually, similar to Turing questions, is to actually pay people
to learn English (at first) and other languages (later), or if they
already know the language then *prove* they know the language (in
this sense very much like the Turing questions) but also brush up
on whatever particular vocabulary they don't already know. This
will be a lot more useful than the Reader's DIgest
stretch-your-vocabulary quizzes, because I'll have *every* user
(who wants to gain credits in this way) learn the *same*
comprehensive list of words, in descending sequence by frequency of
usage (as determined by a combination of a survey I conducted many
years ago for most common words, and Google's search result
estimates for number of articles/pages using a particular word as a
proxy for frequency of usage for words so rare that they are
unlikely to appear more than once per article/page except as mere
repetition). I might ask the user which languages (after English)
they want to learn, and do most-common words in the selected
language, or I might unify *all* languages that appear on the Web
and simply do the most common downward across the board. Thus "the"
"to" "and" "but" from English might start the list, but then "de"
from Spanish and the question character from Chinese and "ang" from
Tagalog might appear mixed in there too, according to Google's
estimate of whole-Web usage. As Chinese-language Web pages get more
common, Chinese characters will creep upward (more frequent)
relative to English words, which will be a fun trend to watch. I
might even include non-Chinese characters on par with words in the
frequency sequence, thus after learning English letters "e" "t" "o"
"a" "n" etc. down through most of the alphabet, as well as the most
common digits, the most common word "the" might appear before the
very uncommon letters such as "j" "q" "z" and "x". This could get
really interesting teaching everyone in the world the same sequence
of letters and digits and word-characters and words etc. from a
mixmash of all the languages that appear on the Web. And since
NewEco's users are getting "paid" (labor credits) for playing along
with this learn-all-the-languages-simultaneously game, I might
actually succeed at teaching all the common languages to everyone,
teaching all the characters and large numbers of vocabulary words
in the *most* common languages (English, Chinese, Spanish),
teaching just the alphabet and very most common words in
less-common languages (Swahili, Sanskrit, Tagalog, Latin, Urdu,
Bengali, etc.).
> This is an even worse problem if the person handing out labor
> credits says he gets nothing of value in return for people
> solving Turing test puzzles.
That's a throwaway bootstrapping tool. It'll be replaced by
for-the-kitty contract-work to build infrastructure, probably
sometime later this year, and also building up vocabulary in all
world languages, probably sometime next year.
> Your labor credits fail (1) because at the moment, no one but you
> will accept them for anything.
If I succeed in finding a "killer application" that thousands of
people will desire to use, such as my original idea (more than a
year ago) of job-ad filtering, then that won't be a problem. People
will *want* labor credits to pay for my "killer application", and
having nearly exhausted their 114 Turing questions they will be
forced to make bids on posted RFBs to earn additional labor credits
to pay for their use of the "killer application". But since RFBs
are anonymous, they won't know whether they are working for me or
for other users who posted RFBs, so this huge pool of labor lookig
for RFBs to bid on will appear, and then there will be a second
thing to spend labor credits on, namely posting RFBs and thus
paying people to do just about any little custom over-the-net task
they can imagine and want. So ultimately, the value that backs the
labor-credit currency is the "killer application", but meanwhile
just about everyone will accept the labor-credit currency in
payment of bills because they can then use those labor credits to
pay for random services they'd like done for them.
> Your labor credits fail (2) because the creator of it doesn't
> think it needs something to back up the currency, even if it's
> "the full faith and credit of the United States", rather than
> something substantial like gold.
What backs up labor credits is whatever applications I provide. In
addition to job-ad filtering, please look at TinyURL.Com/MayProj
for a whole bunch of ideas. Maybe you'll like one of those ideas
and tell me you think *it* could be the "killer application" if I
do a good job of implementing it, or maybe stretching your mind
over those proposals of mine will allow your mind to think outside
the box enough to propose a "killer application" I didn't even
think of yet. I agree that at the moment all I have is the
meta-survey (and later, maybe this weekend or next week, some of
the actual surveys it lists, if enough people vote for any of them,
or I randomly feel like finishing the code despite lack of user
interest), and very likely within a month the job-ad filtering
service, which I hope job-seekers will find of great value, but I
can't be sure until I implment it and then somehow convince some
unemployed people to **try** it.
So what eventually (next month?) backs up labor credits is whatever
the "killer application" is that people actually find of great
value (or pleasure: maybe a nude-female-photo exchange will be most
popular among users?).
> Your labor credits fail (3) because of the ludicrous low limits
> on transaction sizes.
If you want that to change, you'll need to get Congress to repeal
the IRS's right to require onerous reporting daily on every barter
transaction deemed by the IRS to be worth more than one dollar.
> Your labor credits are somewhat shaky on point (4) because they
> can only be transferred at one web site with no claims of backup,
> although that might still work out better than having to use a
> pocket full of quarters to pay your rent.
Correct. As soon as I have about a hundred active users, I plan to
start work on both regular full backup and per-transaction
remote-logging, just in case the free PHP/MySQL hosting service
ever goes down, so that I'll be able to re-constitute the system on
another hosting service from the most recent full backup plus all
transactions that were logged after that backup until the system
went down. But with zero active users right now, it would be a
gross waste of my energy to build backup right now, instead of
simply warning everyone to keep their account balances so low that
if the worst happens they don't lose enough labor credits to really
hurt.
Before either full backup or logging can be implemented, I need to
implement public-key signed+encypted communication from one site to
another. I already have the code working in Lisp, to communicate
between my Macintosh and my Unix shell account, so it'll just be a
matter of direct function-by-function translation from Lisp to PHP,
no major software design needed, that part already done. Since the
PHP/MySQL hosting sites do *not* allow outgoing remote InterNet
connections, I won't be able to have the PHP/MySQL site make a
SOAP-like connection to the remote-logging site every time a
transaction occurs. Instead I'll need to have the PHP/MySQL site
simply write the transaction log to a local file and then poll that
file on a regular basis from my Unix shell account which *does*
allow initiating remote connections. I'm not allowed to run 'chron'
jobs, so instead I'll have the PHP/MySQL site redirect the user's
Web browser to the shell site to trigger a FTP of the latest
transaction log, from time to time, such as every so many minutes,
or every time a large transaction has occurred, or every so many
transactions, or at user-logout time, or any time any of several of
those factors has occurred.
Right now my priority is to explain the system whenever anybody
asks, and attract users to play with surveys/polls so that I get
some user feedback what they want most in NewEco, and try to figure
out what features to implement next to make the system more
attractive to users. As soon as I have at least ten regular active
users, my priorities should change to please my users.
> Incidentally, one thing I haven't heard anything about yet is the
> ability of two people who are members of your site to transfer
> payments of labor credits from one to the other (presumably in
> exchange for something of value, but you don't have to verify
> that).
The *only* thing I'll allow in exchange for labor credits from one
user to another is work to satisfy a labor contract. But there's a
simple trick by which two people to **trust** each other can
exchange a physical object of value for the equivalent labor
credits: The person offering the physical thing of value can
deposit the thing in a secret place, and then the labor contract
can be for telling where to find it and how to get access to it.
For example, Joe has $5 cash, and Jane has 2250 seconds of labor
credits, and they want to trade them (the exchange rate is $8/hr of
course, did I do my math right?). So Joe deposits the money in a
secured box at Mailboxes Inc., and sends regular e-mail to Jane
advising her to post a RFB asking for that info. Jane then posts an
RFB, offering exactly 2250 seconds of credit for information
telling where to find $5 cash. Joe bids, gets the contract, and to
satisfy the contract tells Jane the mailbox location and access
password. Jane gets the info, goes to fetch the money, and then
approves payment for successful completion of the contract. The
clerk at Mailbox Inc. had instructions to witness the money being
handed over, so Jane can't take the money then claim she never got
it. Since Joe and Jane basically trust each other, threat of that
one witness testifying is enough to prevent cheating.
Another way is for Joe to write a personal cheque for $5, take a
digital photo of it, encrypt and sign that photo using a public-key
cryptosystem, and post that in a public place on a Web site. Then
Joe sells the decryption password for that cheque to Jane, allowing
her to print the cheque and deposit it into her bank account.
Or perhaps eBay or PayPal has some electronic equivalent of a
lock-box with password or encrypted payment cupon.
> Think "checking account denominated in labor credits". How much
> does this cost to accomplish (script time if that's what you
> are/will charge for such a service)?
You'll need to think out the specific use cases needed to
accomplish this idea, tell me, and then I can work with you to make
sure we have a good design. Since my system will use public-key
SOAP-like messages for communicating between systems, perhaps you
can set up the labor-credit checking-account on your own server,
and we can work out a fair way to exchange cupons for labor credits
between my NewEco server and your EChecking server to handle
deposits and withdrawls and cashier's cheques etc.
> >There isn't any work place where you can just walk in off the
> >street any time you need money and start to work and earn as much
> >money as you might want and then quit and take home your money, no
> >strings attached. Since you can't get money in the first place, the
> >whole question of trusting it is moot to begin with.
> If anyone can do that, why would they ever want to trade something
> valuable for *MY* labor credits?
I don't see the relation between my text you quoted and your reply
there. I said people can *not* just walk in, but you said "if" they
*can* then ... But they *can't*, so it's moot "what if they could".
I assume we have a communication breakdown there, so please clarify.
So why would anybody want to trade their valuable labor for *your*
labor credits (which you presumably earned via NewEco)? Well maybe
they've exhausted their 114 Turing questions, so they can't get any
more "make work" credits on my system, and maybe the RFBs that I
posted aren't anything they have skills to do, like I want people
to write PHP code for me, translated from Lisp, and they don't know
both languages, so they have no way to earn labor credits except by
working for *you*, because *you* have a RFB asking somebody to do
something they *can* do, nothing that involves translating Lisp to
PHP. And they *need* those labor credits, to pay for the "killer
application", such as filtering job ads, or trading photos of nude
women, so to get the labor credits to pay for the "killer
application" they are willing to do labor for you to get the labor
credits you already have accumulated because you *can* translate
from Lisp to PHP, or you still have some unused Turing questions
because you didn't use them up as fast as the other person did,
because you don't have such a large craving to look at nude ladies.
> >So their universal availablity,
> AKA hyperinflation.
Labor is **metered** available, 24 hours per day in short bursts,
18 hours per day on a continuing basis, so it ain't going to
hyper-inflate.
> You seem to think that it's an *advantage* of labor credits that
> I can earn them any time I want,
Yes, but it takes you at least five minutes of your time to earn
five minutes of labor credits, so you can earn them only gradually
with time, and (after your Turing questions are exhausted) only if
a RFB comes up that you can actually do successfully. With millions
of users, most of them posting several RFBs per day, and with some
kind of search engine (perhaps exactly the job-ad filtering service!),
to help you find RFBs that you can perform, you should be able
to work *some* time each day if you choose.
> but I *cannot* exchange them for dollars.
Who wants dollars when China stops loaning the USA more and more
dollars to support our deficit, and the dollar crashes into
hyper-inflation and isn't worth the paper it's printed on? If you
can trade labor-credits directly for services, and not have to
first convert them to dollars which drop in value by an order of
magnitude from the time you get them until the time you can spend
them (you do ten minutes of labor, which earns you a million
hyper-inflated dollars, which is how much a loaf of bread costs,
but by the time you get to the store to buy the bread, it costs ten
million dollars for that same loaf of bread), wouldn't non-inflated
labor credits be more attractive than worthless dollars?
> I disagree.
In about one or two years, China will stop feeding into USA's deficit.
Just you wait and see the consequences!
> And if labor credits can be exchanged for dollars, then your
> argument about dollars being unobtainable goes out the window.
To avoid hyper-inflation, the USA will need to increase taxes and
curtail virtually expenditures except pay-down of the national
debt. But in that case, *nobody* will have any money, so the
hypothetical abilty to trade one hour of labor-credits for $8USD
will be moot.
> >That's the result of a "scientific/consumer" experiment:
> I don't invest in something as an experiment to see if it's
> trustworthy. Trust has to be established first. To some extent,
> that's "let the other suckers go first".
You've already "trusted" with at least ten minutes of your personal
time, that I'd read the NewsGroup article you took that time to
compose, and that my response would somehow be worth the time you
spent. Don't you think you can spend ten additional seconds of your
time to answer a Turing question to earn labor-credit to vote in
the meta-survey question? Why did you even bother to spend ten
minutes composing the newsgroup article, instead of spending an
order of magnitude *less* time trying NewEco to see how it works?
By the way, three days ago somebody new created an account on
NewEco (Portl1), but I don't recognize the user-name to guess who
it might have been. Was it anybody reading this thread?
> Right now I'm having problems imagining why I would want to pay
> money to bias the results of surveys, which seems to be the only
> thing I can use them for at the moment.
No, you don't pay money, you spend a few seconds of your time.
Yes, all you can do is bias the results of the meta-survey, i.e.
influence which actual survey you can *later* bias, perhaps the
survey that determines which users want as the "killer
application".
> Where would an unemployed person (who, for a while at least, gets
> dollars in unemployment insurance, so don't say dollars are
> unavailable)
*Marginal* dollars are unavailable. You get a particular fixed
amount each week from unemployment or disability or SSI or
retirement etc., but if you want *more* than the fixed amount it's
easier wished than done.
> exchange labor credits for the things he needs: food.
Don't tell the people at the food bank, but they give out more food
than we need to survive, so we have surplus to give away. We aren't
allowed to *sell* it, but there's nothing to stop us from hiding
the extra food in a secret location the *selling* information where
to find it. As long as we're charging labor, not $money$, for where
to find the food, I doubt the food bank will prosecute us, but just
to be safe don't tell them we're thinking of this trick, OK?
> shelter. clothing. medical care. transportation.
I think I covered this question earlier tonight.
> Perhaps even computer access, to look for a job (can be obtained
> at libraries free).
Most of NewEco is configured to work pretty well on cell-phones
with one-inch screens, so you won't even have to go to the library,
just don't try to do something time-urgent while in a "dead zone",
such as while on light-rail going through the tunnel under Diridon,
or in the basement (periodicals room) of the MLK library at SJSU.
You do have a cell-phone with mobile InterNet access, don't you?
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> > Do you have any $cash$ to invest in hiring me the legal etc.
> From: The Natural Philosopher <t...@invalid.invalid>
And according to Mr. Stuckle, it's trivial for you to just go out
and immediately earn that extra money, but he's wrong, it ain't so
easy to get that extra money any time you want?
> > ... Do you know anyone in my local area who likes my
> > ideas well enough, or whom you can convince to like my ideas well
> > enough, to agree to be my business partner?
> Where IS your local area? You need a business angel.
I guess you didn't bother to read full headers in my recent
newsgroup articles? Look here:
> X-Twitter: CalRobert
-> http://twitter.com/CalRobert
--> Location USA California Sunnyvale
or look here:
> From: seeWeb...@rem.intarweb.org (Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t)
-> http://tinyurl.com/uh3t [Seeking employment] > [Plain-text resume (9k)]
---> Sunnyvale, CA 94086
> >> Don't tinker with software, start writing a business plan.
> > The first step in writing a business plan is to identify potential
> > customers for something I offer. I'm stuck at that step, not making
> > any progress for more than 30 years since I first conceived GCD.
> Ah well.
> technology had to catch up.
Yeah. When I first conceived GCD in 1973, the state-of-art in
public-access search engine was a model 33 teletype in a
sound-dampening frame in a book store in Berkeley, linked by
acoustic coupler and leased phone line to a computer at Resource
One in San Francisco running a keyword-based want-ad
posting+retrieval program, hence the format of each of my SQWAs
(Specific Questions Waiting for Answers) with list of keywords
accompanying each question. See the original list, plus new
additions to the list, here:
<http://www.rawbw.com/~rem/MaasInfo/MaasInfo.SQWA.txt>
Doug Miller
>I don't have the emotional energy to make even one cold-call much
>less all ten thousand businesses in the San Jose to Palo Alto area.
>I wouldn't know where to begin talking to a telephone receptionist
>trying to convince her to put me in touch with somebody who will
>hire me right in the middle of the greatest recession since the
>1930's. Maybe you can coach me on that too?
Your coaching on *that* one starts with this: the current recession is *not*
the worst since the 1930s. Not even close. You're apparently either too young
or waaaaay too old to remember the early 1980s, when the unemployment rate,
inflation rate, and mortgage interest rates were *all* in double digits. As
bad as unemployment is now, the rate is still lower than it was in 1981-82,
and inflation and interest rates are *far* lower now than they were then.
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
> the current recession is *not* the worst since the 1930s. Not
> even close. You're apparently either too young or waaaaay too old
> to remember the early 1980s, when the unemployment rate, inflation
> rate, and mortgage interest rates were *all* in double digits. As
> bad as unemployment is now, the rate is still lower than it was in
> 1981-82, and inflation and interest rates are *far* lower now than
> they were then.
I didn't really notice any unemployment during that time. I had
employment available the whole time, and was not working only for a
few months (late 1980 to early 1981) by my choice because I needed
time to fix up my personal life. I did, however, have a period of
under-employment, when my boss (Patrick Suppes) assigned me only 5
hours work per week, not enough to pay for both living expenses and
automobile transmission overhaul that was needed at that time.