Invitation

[Chad Perrin]

On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 09:47:11PM +0000, Simon Tibble wrote:
> On 14/02/11 21:12, David Kelly wrote:
> > On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 08:54:59PM +0000, Simon Tibble wrote:
> >>
> >> Now, see, I can't help thinking that if we all just abandoned money
> >> then the motivation for people to do this sort of thing would then
> >> disappear - would it not?
> > 
> > Without money, how would we keep score to know who is winning?
> 
> By measuring ones contribution.  This can be quantified by creating a
> system whereby one's output is measured.  It is not a credit system,
> rather a combination of reputation (feedback of others) and how much
> produce or time you effect.  Try to think ebay without the money, and
> instead of leaving feedback after every transaction you only leave the
> feedback just once (how do you feel about the other person? good/bad).

Broken.  Won't work.  It's too bureaucratic for too little (immediate)
return to catch on, and its bureaucracy would guarantee long-term
corruption.

We'll probably evolve semi-naturally to a reputation based economy as
advancing technology eliminates a lot of basic-needs scarcity, but that's
just speculation.  In the meantime, "money" is really nothing but a
scalable way to lubricate the process of trade.  The more you centralize
the management of money (or its replacement), the less efficiently it
works -- and trying to quantify "contribution" through some uniform
system as you suggest would require absurd levels of centralization.

If you really want to do away with money, the best way to do it is to
advance the state of the art of automation technology.  You can do this
by contributing expertise, time, and money (in decreasing order of
importance) to copyfree [0] and open source [1] software development
projects such as FreeBSD.  Trying to distract the people contributing to
such projects with pie-in-the-sky manifestations of song lyrics from the
early '70s [2] is actually counterproductive to that aim.

> 
> But don't mind me.  I'm a crazy man with random mumbles.

That's good advice.  I should follow it.

# NOTES:

[0] http://copyfree.org

[1] http://www.opensource.org

[2] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Imagine_(song)

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
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