Designing a Cooperative

[noddy]

i think this is one of the points that aus and usa have diverged quite a bit.

our financial cliff, is baby boomers playing every game in the book to maintain house prices, our debt bomb is private not public and you would froth from all orifices about the levels of government regulation and land supply games that keep the prices going up.

your version of that has already collapsed as i understand it while ours has gone on to absurd new levels.. any slight drop in employment or wages will cause a mindboggling amount of repo man work.. in this environment my shitshack is not going to crash as much in value (it cant!) and leaves me far less a wage slave.

[Mr. Perfect]

Yes, I don't know anything about the AUS market. Around here renting makes sense in 9 out of 10 cases. And our government is going under before our corporations do, long before.

[Ibrahim]

i think this is one of the points that aus and usa have diverged quite a bit.

our financial cliff, is baby boomers playing every game in the book to maintain house prices, our debt bomb is private not public and you would froth from all orifices about the levels of government regulation and land supply games that keep the prices going up.

your version of that has already collapsed as i understand it while ours has gone on to absurd new levels.. any slight drop in employment or wages will cause a mindboggling amount of repo man work.. in this environment my shitshack is not going to crash as much in value (it cant!) and leaves me far less a wage slave.

Assuming a massive real estate bubble bursting in Australia, and the ensuing mass unemployment and spike in homelessness, do you really envision any of the catastrophic scenarios that Americans are always predicting within a decade? Things seem slightly more stable where I am, but its hard to see the kind of survivalist scenarios popping up, it seems frankly ridiculous (though there are always some hobbyists prepping for it).

[noddy]

its a matter of degree and use of language, their are most certainly some outter burbs of the 2 big cities (melbourne and sydney) i wouldnt want to be within a 100 miles of.

rioting and looting and packs of amphetamine amped nihilists looking for violence could be described as mad max.

it wouldnt be all over australia or last that long - however if i was caught in those places a bunker full of beans and ammo would certainly do more good than harm to my feeling of mental wellbeing

america does have a lot more outter burbs on big cities than we do.

[Mr. Perfect]

nods, keep in mind that our debts didn't go to the redline until the bubble burst. Basically we took the debts in the private sector and put them on the public books, and then added a bunch more for fun.

[noddy]

guess who's cuntry (not a mispelling) has decided to government back the private banks in case such thing does happen.

[Mr. Perfect]

Regulation babay. Ya done sealed your fate.

[noddy]

i take my dose of fukitol daily and dont allow myself to angst over the tsunami on the horizon, long gone are the days i tried to convince the coastal peoples it was coming.

all up, ill do my best to be on the highest ground available and cooperate with the folks i find around me and put up with the limits of what that can do, a system which works in good times and bad.

which brings us back to topic - cooperatives, the best and only form of human organisation, all the rest are sugar coated lies to make someone elses utopia.

[Simple Minded]

i take my dose of fukitol daily and dont allow myself to angst over the tsunami on the horizon, long gone are the days i tried to convince the coastal peoples it was coming.

all up, ill do my best to be on the highest ground available and cooperate with the folks i find around me and put up with the limits of what that can do, a system which works in good times and bad.

which brings us back to topic - cooperatives, the best and only form of human organisation, all the rest are sugar coated lies to make someone elses utopia.

Amen brother. When you break it all down, it's about freedom of association and voluntary transactions.

Force people outside those two spheres and they start gettin mentally irregular....

Once you get outside the binary speak of campaigning, people seem to be pretty consistent. Me thinketh, that seems to be why people who are good at getting elected seem to suck at problem solving.

You say tow-ma-toe, I say tow-mat-o.......

[Simple Minded]

Great thead!!!

So far, I think we've proven that cooperation can't be designed, it has to continually evolve.......

kinda like culture and all its variant half-lives.....

or what the meaning of the word is is.........

which kinda splains why them is always wrong......... and we is always right......

Other than the golden rule......

[Simple Minded]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/ ... 48222.html

Regarding the above article, whether capitalism or new technology is the driver will no doubt be debated forever.

The article is a slightly different take than the ubiquitous articles of 30 years ago stating that information age tech would allow people who formerly couldn't communicate easily to easily communicate. The experts stated that would obviously, change human nature and lead to much more agreement than disagreement.

Seems like nothing has changed and that people primarily cooperate with others and build communities for selfish reasons....... or reasons of self-interest.... if that sounds more.... palatable or noble.

Tools often amplify human nature, but never seem to change it much. Who knew?

[Enki]

The new business model that I am seeing is one where ownership is more fungible. Each project becomes its own corporation with its own shareholders, whether formally or informally. Kind of like how films are produced. The film has its own company unto itself that is managed by the large investment banks that we know by names like Warner Brothers, Sony, etc...

In the company I am working with, there is equity stake in the company itself, and then there are equity stakes in projects that we incubate. Not quite a cooperative, but it is a hybrid cooperative/contract/corporate model.

[Mr. Perfect]

The new business model is $#!tshacks and prepper communities, anything else is whistling, whistling in the graveyard.

[Simple Minded]

The new business model that I am seeing is one where ownership is more fungible. Each project becomes its own corporation with its own shareholders, whether formally or informally. Kind of like how films are produced. The film has its own company unto itself that is managed by the large investment banks that we know by names like Warner Brothers, Sony, etc...

In the company I am working with, there is equity stake in the company itself, and then there are equity stakes in projects that we incubate. Not quite a cooperative, but it is a hybrid cooperative/contract/corporate model.

I recall reading a couple authors predicting that exact model, Hollywood films, as the logical outcome of information age tech on bidding/awarding contracts back in the 90s. Made sense to me at the time, and still does. Downside is no one likes competing against lower cost vendors, but as buyers, we all like buying more for less.

Same same, as before, yet on a bigger scale. Harder for me to blame locals for my non-increasing wages and easier to blame the vaguely defined others of far away who are willing to work harder/smarter than I for less.

The logical result is more market wide equality of wages/prices. Western wages/prices going down, Eastern wages/prices going up.

Perhaps local communities will be less business focused, and more focused on other local aspects, culture, religion, recreation, climate, etc.

[Simple Minded]

The new business model is $#!tshacks and prepper communities, anything else is whistling, whistling in the graveyard.

I heard the term prepper the other day, and I thought of playing in people's garages and barns as a kid, or visiting older friends and relatives.

Everyone who was born between 1880-1930 saved everything. Their barns, shops, closets, kitchen drawers were full of scrap wood, bent nails, screws, nuts, bolts, pieces of wire or string that were only 10" long or so, tire patching kits.........

If I had a dollar for everytime I heard "Waste not! want not!"

Living thru those times definitely leaves a mark on your psyche....

[Enki]

The new business model that I am seeing is one where ownership is more fungible. Each project becomes its own corporation with its own shareholders, whether formally or informally. Kind of like how films are produced. The film has its own company unto itself that is managed by the large investment banks that we know by names like Warner Brothers, Sony, etc...

In the company I am working with, there is equity stake in the company itself, and then there are equity stakes in projects that we incubate. Not quite a cooperative, but it is a hybrid cooperative/contract/corporate model.

I recall reading a couple authors predicting that exact model, Hollywood films, as the logical outcome of information age tech on bidding/awarding contracts back in the 90s. Made sense to me at the time, and still does. Downside is no one likes competing against lower cost vendors, but as buyers, we all like buying more for less.

Same same, as before, yet on a bigger scale. Harder for me to blame locals for my non-increasing wages and easier to blame the vaguely defined others of far away who are willing to work harder/smarter than I for less.

The logical result is more market wide equality of wages/prices. Western wages/prices going down, Eastern wages/prices going up.

Perhaps local communities will be less business focused, and more focused on other local aspects, culture, religion, recreation, climate, etc.

I think I am positioned in a pretty growth industry myself. We sell professional white glove software development to keep our people paid while working on business incubation of the tools we develop in the process of helping our clients. A piece of software you sell to your first client may become a software suite you sell to future clients down the road.

What I am most interested in as it regards software and its use is the process side of it. How do humans use it? What requirement is there to train a human to use this software suite?

There is a whole lot of growth potential in this market, because there is a lot of cross-platform functionality that I can see as being a hole in the market, a huge gaping one, ready to be filled by millions of contractors.

[noddy]

hah, you once told me that standards are important in software - now you see why they are actually the devil - most of my best paid work is interop glue

long may all the corporate vendors make their stuff incompatible, long may i get paid to work around that.

[Mr. Perfect]

Hm, Tinker gave up on the commune and went to work in the world of corporate personhood. You can knock me over with a feather.

[Enki]

hah, you once told me that standards are important in software - now you see why they are actually the devil - most of my best paid work is interop glue

I dunno, what's more standard than, "Every app has an API"? That's the gold standard if you know what I mean.

long may all the corporate vendors make their stuff incompatible, long may i get paid to work around that.

Absolutely. Standardization is more for hardware anyway.

[Taboo]

Yes, I don't know anything about the AUS market. Around here renting makes sense in 9 out of 10 cases. And our government is going under before our corporations do, long before.

Not sure what you mean here. We have ridiculously underpriced mortgages right now (~0% real interest rate) that can be bought at FIXED rates. If I were not living in Russia and had a significant borrowing ability, I'd buy big into US real estate, probably in the DC/North VA area . The real interest rates cannot stay at 0% forever, and when they do diverge, I would get a 30-70% discount on my purchase.

[Enki]

Government cannot go down before the corporations do. If the government goes down, so do most of the corporations.

[Enki]

Anyway, designing a cooperative is really easy. It's just a matter of putting all of the skillsets of everyone in the cooperative in a bucket, and then when going out to market those skillsets you market the collective skillsets and not the individual skillsets.

[Mr. Perfect]

Yes, I don't know anything about the AUS market. Around here renting makes sense in 9 out of 10 cases. And our government is going under before our corporations do, long before.

Not sure what you mean here. We have ridiculously underpriced mortgages right now (~0% real interest rate) that can be bought at FIXED rates. If I were not living in Russia and had a significant borrowing ability, I'd buy big into US real estate, probably in the DC/North VA area . The real interest rates cannot stay at 0% forever, and when they do diverge, I would get a 30-70% discount on my purchase.

Good luck on that.

It takes a year or more if you need to sell, few people are in a position to be able to do that. 4% mortgages don't look that great if the market dips another 10%+.

[Mr. Perfect]

Government cannot go down before the corporations do. If the government goes down, so do most of the corporations.

That's because you misunderstand, as always, the true nature of corporations.

Governments are going down.

http://www.detroitnews.com/article/2012 ... or-Detroit

[Mr. Perfect]

Anyway, designing a cooperative is really easy. It's just a matter of putting all of the skillsets of everyone in the cooperative in a bucket, and then when going out to market those skillsets you market the collective skillsets and not the individual skillsets.

Good points.

However, it is next to impossible to get anyone to join a collective. I mean you won't even join a collective. You joined a corporation, greedily exploiting markets.

I mean if you of all people won't join a coop then who in the world ever will.