2012/08/26 13:00 MDT – In a farmer’s market, no one is happy to see the number of stalls decline.
The failure of the US economic model is rooted in the fallacy that it is not sufficient that one prosper, one must destroy the competition.
It’s hogwash, and it literally kills people by making it a certainty that the United States be in a constant state of war.
That history is unfolding in our GPL’d work "The Amber Odyssey".
Here’s how we think about Twitter as an economy. We keep the audioplay, music and eBooks free. We Tweet the crap out of it, but we do so within the rules of Twitter. We do not spam. We are good citizens, we are good neighbours, but it is not pure altruism which makes us ReTweet the Tweets of others.
We need each other.
What we sell is our engagement model on Twitter only. We price it so the upper tier of our pricing model matches off to small businesses.
We have neither the people nor the desire to market for "The Corporate Psychopaths", the large companies and banks and the wannabe-psychopaths who work for them. Think middle-management suits, the horizontally-mobile who dream of verticality. Take heart that death comes to all.
Via IBCS, we recycle old computer hardware. @Illyria_Blue (@JackZeman) and @WebmasterRidge turn groups of old machines into supercomputer-quick clusters. You can donate machines, or you can donate money to support them.
This is about doing good business well.
We pay ourselves first.
We allocate 10% of net for savings.
We avoid debt because wars are all about controlling debt. Debt will kill your sons & daughters and it will kill you too.
If you pro-actively save money, you will castrate the banks and their droids much more quickly than by occupying their lobby. You will put war out of business.
If you put war out of business, the banks suddenly work for you again. If the banks work for you, your government will soon follow suit.
We take the new net number and divide it into three parts. The first is 40% of the new net and goes towards investing in our ability to be faster, smarter and cost efficient, and giving our paying clients better value for their investment in us.
Sixty percent of the new net remains if you are keeping score at home.
Half of that goes to donations to other suppliers of non-DRM entertainment, not-for-profit organizations and people who develop Open Source software.
The remaining amount goes towards actively participate in the market which supports our business. To borrow the farmer’s market analogy again, if we are growing onions and you are in the next stall selling carrots, we will buy your carrots. We hope you will buy our onions.
Only after you buy our onions will it become apparent to everyone that money isn’t needed unless fair value of carrots and onions are severely out of whack.
It’s the love of money which is evil, not money itself.
The large corporations and banks are complicit in supplying small-arms to any group of people who can’t afford them and who have an axe to grind. The ones who can’t afford the weapons are the debt of which I spoke earlier.
The People’s Republic Of China is the largest manufacturer of small arms on the planet.
Why don’t we just settle for doing good business well on a scale we can all afford instead of collaborating with our institutions who actively promote war?
The obsession with "go big or go home", celebrity, which is the first cousin to the love of money, and being "number one" is killing the environment, the world economy, the education system and contributing to the literal deaths of millions of living creatures.
Let’s just stop supporting bad enterprises.
It’s like stopping drinking to the alcoholic; it is the answer. It requires moral fiber and support to get it done.
But we did it. Sometime this month, right near the first anniversary of doing business through Twitter, we will see our 1,000,000th reader-listener-visitor to our
project website.
My bonus is I get first pick of your carrots. We eat well, & we haven’t killed anyone yet.
Join us, or join forces with someone like us.
#1 by David on 2012/08/27 - 01:53
I read many blogs each day, the majority offer criticism of what is .. with no developed alternative to suggest … here we see a way that normal people can break the current business as usual model … and create a real way forward at grass roots level, the writer sees the problem clearly, for surely the essence of the failure of the current system is, Yes, competition is a good thing … but this focus of “killing” the competition leads to less competition, not more … and the Capitalist system only works when there is a lot of competition.
Instead, now we have ended up where power and control is increasingly being consolidated in few hands… and as history clearly shows consolidated power crushes liberty … there is no way for them to co-exist, and so democracy and freedoms are becoming a memory.
These same organizations where power is being consolidated have been driving us to “buy to consume” … Why ? … because they need us to, so they continue to exist … there is great wisdom and freedom in being free of debt … for when you are in debt, you are not only paying the debt with money, but also with your freedom.
Other aspects of this strategy, is that it supports like minded people and organisations. Also in the wider market, it gives Value driven support for small business, which allows them to grow and hence increase competition, and with the support of like minded organisations that are not driven just on price but on equity, relevancy and impact … it will succeed, this enhances choice.
At a community level, the exchange of produce to help each other is a great point to start with and perhaps over time, this may grow into community driven projects such as growing food, or (?), the great upside is that it gives purpose, and brings everyone together to help themselves and each other … this develops everyone involved, promotes community cohesion and purpose and lessens the likely hood that people will fall through the cracks.
This post makes sense as it is something that everyone can do today … to challenge and change the what is, to what it can be, for at the end of the day, if we all don’t do this who else will ?
#2 by uleaguehub on 2012/08/29 - 04:04
This is a dream of the future that we share. Information wants to be free.
There is enough to go around… and then some… if we are all willing to live simply, carefully, passionately, and creatively.
Thanks.