Sometimes you just gotta protect prior art :(....
Modifications on the Street Performer Protocol
The Street Performer Protcol (SPP) [1] and the
Rational Street Performer Protocol (RSPP) [2] are protocols
for cooperatively pooling money for the development and
release of public works projects (Music, Software, general Intellectual
Property, freeways, neighborhood improvement, etc.).
The following are some modifications of the SPP and RSPP to
incur greater social monetization on such systems:
1) Matching Funds with Information RSPP (MRSPP)
- Project specification is published
- bonds are issued or moneys are opened for collection by intermediary
- Investors are given to opportunity to match funds of other
investors or as a percentage of total investment, to a maximum.
Matching fund information is published to publicly or to
all interested investors.
- Project development occurs concurrently
- Project is then judged by intermediary to match the specification
- money is released to project developers
2) Depreciation over time (dSPP)
- Protocol uses SPP, RSPP, MSRPP or any variant thereof
- Project specifcation is issued
- built into the contract is time sensitive information
- As time progresses, the amount of total investment
payout depreciates over time, and money is refunded
to investors depending on depreciation.
[1] "The Street Performer Protocol and Digital Copyrights", Kelsey and Schneier, http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_6/kelsey/
[2] "The Rational Street Performer Protcol", Paul Harrison, http://www.logarithmic.net/pfh/RSPP
Interviewed for a rather unglamorous contract at SourceForge. In the process of interview and office politics, CowboyNeal's name (of slashdot fame came up. The interview mistook my fondness of CowboyNeal as a professional reference... The totality of my physical interactions with CowboynNeal can be summed up with me libating him for several hours with an unidentified compound, and generally taking to him while in various altered states over IRC for some time thereafter.
Needless to say, CowboyNeal was unable to professionally comment on my coding style :(. However, should the poll ever come up on slashdot, "who do you give as your professional reference", I can honestly answer "CowboyNeal"!
Happy Birthdays to deirdre,espe, biella, Stanton, dbaseiv, and schoen, and of course, myself :)
Virgos (and near virgos) most 3133t in sex0ring up!!! ;)
I read your blog today, thought I would chime in on something you might not have considered re: petroleum producers pricing oil in Euros. Remember what they used to say about Russia during the last days of Communist rule? The phrase was, "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us." In other words, nobody worked in Communist Russia, and nobody got paid. It was just one huge Ponzi-type fraud. What about today? Today we run another kind of fraud....
My friend and securities trader, Evan Kennedy (kennedyevan@hot-no-spam-remove-mail.com) wrote me an email in reply to the last entry. I am posting his reply here:
I read your blog today, thought I would chime in on something you might not have considered re: petroleum producers pricing oil in Euros.Remember what they used to say about Russia during the last days of Communist rule? The phrase was, "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us." In other words, nobody worked in Communist Russia, and nobody got paid. It was just one huge Ponzi-type fraud.
What about today? Today we run another kind of fraud. We pay our foreign friends for their goods with dollars that we print at will. Then our foreign friends take these fiat dollars, and with them they buy Treasury bonds. That allows the US economy to hold together, which in turn allows our foreign friends to continue selling us their merchandise and services. So it's a sort of insane, fantasy arrangement. We print phoney money to buy their real merchandise and services. Our foreign friends accept the phoney money and with that money they buy our bonds. Why do they buy the bonds? They buy our bonds because if they didn't buy them, rates in the US would go sky-high, the US would sink into recession, and our foreign friends couldn't sell us their goods and services.
In other words, we buy their good with the money they now lend us.
But all fantasies eventually bump into reality. Foreigners now own 46% of US Treasuries. At some point they will have had enough. They'll be loaded with too much US paper, and when it's perceived that there's too much US paper, then the dollar will start a serious slide. At that point there'll be a scramble to either get out of US Treasuries or at least diversify.
So the phenomenon that's holding the global economy together at this point is the continued acceptance of US dollars. As long as the world continues to accept dollars the game can go on, and the US can continue to operate while producing massive deficits in both its trade and in its current account.
There are two opposing forces at work today, and one of them is going to win. There's the forces of deflation. This is a function of world over-production or I should say INCREASING over-production. Over-production puts pressure on prices, and it puts pressure on corporations to become more "productive."
For most corporations, their big expense is labor, so how to you become "more productive"? You fire people. The more people you can fire and still produce the same amount of goods and services, the more productive you become.
That's one element in deflation. The other is lower wages, and here you're talking about China, India and Asia. There's no way that the US can compete in the area of wages, so what's the answer? The answer is to transfer our manufacturing and services to lands where we can take advantage of cheap labor. Again, deflation.
OK, we can't compete, but at the same time the American people want to keep up their high standards of living and their buying habits. America's consumers don't want to cut back, so they buy on credit, but they do keep buying. This creates the negative trade balances, but the Fed creates the dollars which make up the difference.
What about the deflationary forces that I discussed above? The Fed fights the deflationary forces by expanding the money supply. The US is swimming in money [editor's note- from the recent interest rate drops], and if you're swimming in money how can you have deflation?
The flood of money inflates the price of housing and it inflates the prices of stocks. But underneath it all is the disease. And since the disease isn't addressed, it gets worse and worse. But people don't like disease, even economic disease -- so they ignore it -- for now.
I had a string of wholly disturbing and unpatriotic thoughts the other day, of which I thought "I should not publish this"... But given the low readership of this page, I figured what the hell.
All of us have felt the impacts of the current recession in one form or another. Armchair economists may have some reason to raise a couple of eyebrows. The first is a small but continuing stream of reports on oil producing nations switching trade to the Euro. Conspiracy theorists may say this is the reason for the invasion of Iraq, and the funding of the anti-Chavez movements in Venezuela. Personally, I don't wholesale buy it. But what does pique my interest is the steady stream of reports on the wavering rate decline between the dollar and Euro... There are a number of reasons for this- but Europe remains by and large a larger and more educated market (though with many more trade restrictions, and lots of artificial boundaries).
Even more disturbing, particularly for people in my industry is the unprecedented amount of white collar and technical foreign outsourcing- not just in software, but also accounting, labs, stock trading, tech support... To make matters worse, America has traditionally relied on "brain drain" immigration to fuel intellectual property development. Thanks to the Shrub, America has become a decidedly less immigrant friendly place than it was a couple of years ago. Also, thanks to a short sighted industry, we are assaulted by a barrage of anti-research laws, such as the DMCA, SSSCA, etc.
While no doubt, the United States will continue to be the lead of IP generation if nothing else because of having the best educational and lab infrastructure in the world, for a long time to come... The thought still lingers- why does the rest of the world have to play solely by America's game with the [albeit painful and haphazard] unionization of Europe, and the advent of many to many global communications?
What is driving the American economy right now? Where is the push coming from? it's not coming from investors and certainly not from the government.
So then the evil thoughts came to me... It would be very easy to social engineer a meme on the internet amongst American citizens: invest in Euros, because it is a safe long term bet.
As much as the IMF and other global traders have fscked with everyone else's currency, the dollar remains the standard. Having Americans hoard someone else's currency- having a dollar panic within the United States itself- is unheard of. But what is stopping it at this point? If a dollar panic were to occur, it would be globally catastrophic, and *very* bad for American citizens.
I write this, however, because I wonder how long it may be until key Pacific Rim banks start increasing their Euro holdings- inducing a similar net effect from the outside...
My new photo gallery is up. This is after a long time of promising to send out pix of Puerto Rico, Brazil, and a number of other places and events. Someday, I might even gain enough time and energy to toss in some commentary, although feel free to do so yourselves with the commenting feature of the gallery software :D.
In so far as my recent trip to Brazil, the 2 coolest things I have managed to import back to the United States has been the ubiquitous Brazilian soda, Guarana Antarctica (the "R" in "Antarctica is silent for all y'all english speakers), and rips of Funky. Funky (do morro) is an awesome form of brazilian hip hops, coming straight outta the favelas. The samples are stripped down and turned up, and the lyrics pack tons of raw animal brazilian sex in the voices. As such, since much of Funky is isolated to Brazil, and next to impossible to find, even on the p2p networks, I'm starting a repository until someone shuts me down. Brazileros, please feel free to contribute!
Here's a starter pack: Funk Neurotico
P.S. Shouts out and muito obrigado to meu irmaos Jose, Lilly, 'Berta, Maria, Miguel, Tropikao, and the whole CMI Rio crew!
Do Morro!
However, one event caught my attention- the "radical honesty" parlor and workshop. This piqued my interest more than anything that didn't involve sexy body parts at burning man. Being on the edge of the city, I missed the parlor, and the workshop was bordering on lame: it was more of a philosophical discussion of honesty, and what I gathered, the parlor was heavily mediated... Not much on the social lab aspect, which is what I wanted.
One fellow burner was equally disappointed in the "fakkir challenge", which turned out be holding yoga poses for as long as you can. He came in fully suited up to prove his machoness by sitting on a bed of hot wood chips, or something of the like.
[personally, I think holding a yoga for 3 hours on end is way on the far end of adeptness and ego challenge for me, but to each their own]
As we blathered about my wanting a camp for tweaking the parameters of social interaction, and him wanting a camp designed for challenging people's freudian egos, we came up with "Super Action Challenge Camp" - the camp that will make Burning Man tourists rue the day they set foot into it... Burning Man came and went this year, with the usual glitz, mass nudity, and the occasional "holy fuck, I can't beleive I just saw that".
However, one event caught my attention- the "radical honesty" parlor and workshop. This piqued my interest more than anything that didn't involve sexy body parts at burning man. Being on the edge of the city, I missed the parlor, and the workshop was bordering on lame: it was more of a philosophical discussion of honesty, and what I gathered, the parlor was heavily mediated... Not much on the social lab aspect, which is what I wanted.
One fellow burner was equally disappointed in the "fakkir challenge", which turned out be holding yoga poses for as long as you can. He came in fully suited up to prove his machoness by sitting on a bed of hot wood chips, or something of the like.
[personally, I think holding a yoga for 3 hours on end is way on the far end of adeptness and ego challenge for me, but to each their own]
As we blathered about my wanting a camp for tweaking the parameters of social interaction, and him wanting a camp designed for challenging people's freudian egos, we came up with "Super Action Challenge Camp" - the camp that will make Burning Man tourists rue the day they set foot into it...
Here are some of the ideas so far:
1) Mad Social Scientist Radical Honesty sessions:
This camp is intended as safe space for people to have interactions without social filters. Ground rules: no outright attacking, otherwise you have to honestly speak what is on your mind, NO FILTERS, NO SECRETS. One hour in a room with a half dozen other strangers. Have you ever wondered what people REALLY think? Have you ever wondered: do people think I'm ugly? Do people think I'm fat? How do people really find my demeanor? How much do I really filter when I communicate? What can you realistically get away with?
2) Bound Up Dating Service:
Line up, 2 total stranger MOTAS are tied/handcuffed together, and then sent out in the wilds of the desert for several hours, left to figure out how to interact in a very physically restricted space. Safety is OFF- so you are on your own figuring out how to go to the bathroom, etc. How fast can you figure out how to cooperate when you don't have a choice?
3) Black Rock City Fakir Challenge
*Everyone* has walked on coal at some point or another. But have you sewed your mouth shut? Been strung up by the nipples?
4) Fat Rocky City Party
Smash the beauty myth!
Join the FATSOS at Super Action Challenge Camp for a pot luck Food Orgy and Phat Ass Funk DJ, Friday night from 7:00 pm till Homey cums...
Say it loud, I'm FAT and I'm Proud
BABY GOT BACK KARAOKE COMPETITION ! ! !
More to cummmmmmm.....!
New Blog! Woot!
Customization is such a pain in the ass... More construction to come...