|
|
9 May 2003 @ 08:28, by waalstraat. Visual Arts, Graphics
It's my Birthday tommorow and I want to share my birthday piece with all of you in this buzzing garden of exchange, with all my best wishes and blessings for everyone...Bernard (Waalstraat)
I promised a couple of you I would send you instructions on how I did the last sharing...I still will, but I have been a little ill...trying to catch up now... More >
|
|
|
|
8 May 2003 @ 23:59, by ming. Technology
My printer suddenly started to print, and spat out a page that contained only this:
# Keep this simple, explicit, and redundant
V8
Ou0
Og0
OL0
Oeq
OQ/tmp
I hadn't asked it to print anything. Has never happened before. Well, it is a network connected printer, with its own IP, so I suppose somebody could have initiated it from elsewhere. Except for that it has a password.
A quick search in Google showed me that this is part of the standard content of mail.cf, one of sendmail's configuration files. Could be from one of my servers, but it would still be a mystery how it ended up on my printer.
Or maybe it is just good advice from the ethers. Keep it simple, explicit, and redundant. I'll try to remember. More >
|
|
|
|
8 May 2003 @ 20:41, by zarvarza. Altered States
I seek input as to the meaning of this dream. More >
|
|
|
|
 7 May 2003 @ 14:32, by ming. Personal Development
I used to imagine that it was possible to make people sane by working them through a certain regimen, a certain sequence of progressively more advanced steps. That there would be a methodology that could be applied to just about anybody, and the end result would be a sane and rational human being.
I'm not saying I no longer believe that it is possible, but I've sort of lost touch with that way of looking at things, and I have more reasons to be doubtful than I used to.
A.E. van Vogt wrote a series of science fiction books in the 50s about the world of "null-A". They would make the most sense to somebody who had studied general semantics, and they were essentially a fictional description of a world where general semantics principles were put to serious use. An elite corps of individuals were trained in infinite valued logic, the awareness of abstraction, and the ability to create a semantic pause, where you step back from all the inadequate perceptions, limiting concepts, reactions and emotions, and examine what is actually going on before you act. Somebody who could think clearly and rationally, on multiple levels, taking all factors into consideration, no matter the circumstances. And, well, despite that Korzybski had outlined such principles in considerable detail, no such corps of rational people has been assembled in our world. Maybe because he outlined the principles, but not necessarily the techniques for getting people to live them. Maybe because it is more complicated than that.
Many years ago I was a scientologist. More than 20 years since I was kicked out of Scientology. One of the key endeavors in Scientology is to develop individuals into a state called "clear". A clear would be a person who no longer has irrational reactions to what he experiences in life. I.e. no more blind push-button reactions, where one ends up doing something that one doesn't want and which doesn't work. Where one unconsciously does something destructive instead of what serves the circumstances best. Where one walks around in a hypnotic state, responding to distorted commands from one's subconscious mind, rather than being aware, awake and present in the moment. And, well, there are systematic methods for locating and transforming these various areas. And when one has reached a certain state where one is more powerful than one's subconscious, and actually able to make one's own conscious and rational decisions about things, that's when one is labeled "clear". I became a clear, and there certainly is something to it. You can systematically become more sane. However, since then I've more and more taken it with a grain of salt, and realized that it wasn't quite as absolute and permanent a state of being as it appeared. Nevertheless, it became part of who I am.
For many years after that I would predominantly hang out with people who were "doing their work" as it is often called in new age circles. In part because I was a professional counselor who would facilitate personal change. So, I was mostly paying attention to people who were on a path of personal development, who were working in their own way on being more sane, more present, more whole. Maybe they were meditating, maybe they were getting therapy, maybe they were rewiring their own minds with NLP. But they were doing something, and even though it would be many different disciplines, there would be a certain underlying agreement about the value of being more awake, empowered, enlightened, whole, or whatever it might be called.
At some point I stopped bothering seeking out that kind of people. In part because I'm interested in life as it really is, in whatever form it takes, and it was a little boring just hanging out with people who had the same kinds of views on things. Great gifts might appear in unexpected places. The truth might be spoken where you least expect it. Life is something to experience, not to just sit and be holy about.
But now, to get to my point. We live in a world where there's no generally agreed upon norm for what is sane and what isn't. We aren't being trained in identifying what is sane and what is less sane. We aren't being trained in thinking. We aren't being trained in recognizing truth or deception.
The people who are supposed to be the certified specialists in such things often have the least clue. Oh, there are some brilliant and prominent psychiatrists around, who somehow have managed to maintain an intuition for what people need. But aside from that, I don't think I've enountered such a concentration of lunatics in any other field. That's not what I wanted to rant about, however.
My point is more personal. I somehow have an implicit assumption that the people I deal with have gone through a path in life that somehow is equivalent to mine. Not doing the same things, but somehow having similar experiences, learning similar things, and ending up with some kind of mature sanity about life. And the thing is that I'm more and more noticing that that is not the case at all. Many people have made it this far in life without ever "working on themselves". Many people have adopted some kind of fixed solution to everything, making themselves right and others wrong. Religious dogma, fundamentalist materialism, self-centered cosmology, everybody else is an asshole kind of beliefs.
See, if I were a counselor and you came to see me to fix that kind of personal problems, I'm thoroughly trained and educated in helping you out of such limiting beliefs. But if you don't, I have neither the right nor the means to disabuse you of very much that you believe in. And what I realize I'm missing nowadays is a shared frame of reference. Many human relations remain dysfunctional, or end in a word-against-word impasse, because there is no shared methodology available for bringing back sanity. "You're an asshole! No, YOU are!!" Hard to sort out unless we agreed to a shared frame of reference and a shared ethic from the start.
If you're part of some group that has a shared standard and a shared frame of reference, life is so much easier, even if the frame of reference is itself flawed. If you're a religious fundamentalist, you'll have a book where you can look up what is wrong with other people. They're sinners, they eat meat on Thursdays, they use bad words. They just need to act the right way and say the right words, and they're back on track. If you're a scientologist you notice when people act irrationally, and you know that if they'll just do their next level of clearing, they'll be better. If you belong to an -ism, you probably have tests of whether somebody is in their right mind or not, and you're have solutions handy. Some better than others. But if you don't belong to any -ism, you can't go around correcting other people's lack of sanity. Much of the time you have to just put up with it, ignore it, argue about it, or refuse to work with them, calling them names if necessary.
What I'm afraid of is whether maybe we all on this planet are half-lunatics walking around in our own little private worlds, seeing what we want to see, re-confirming our old beliefs, grumbling about things that didn't even happen, never quite understanding anybody else, other than when they accidentally happen to validate our own beliefs. Uarrrgh! More >
|
|
|
|
5 May 2003 @ 23:57, by newdawn. Ideas, Creativity
Yesterday, May 5, was my birthday. It was a beautiful still autumn day and my children prepared the table for the morning as we always do on special occassions such as birthdays, Easter and Christmas. Fresh flowers were secretly cut from the garden and placed in my favourite vase on the table.
Before breakfast presents were opened at the table and then we shared pastries my eldest went and bought from the bakery. And nobody was even late for school!
That evening we shared dinner prepared by the children.
Before I went to bed my daughter came in with a card she wanted me to have just from her. She has a wicked sense of humour and also great profoundness in her understanding of life. In it she wrote a most profound message that I would like to share.
Dear Mummy
Can you tell
If you are asleep or awake
Perhaps when you dream
You think in your head
That life is what you are living
Right now, this moment
Maybe, just maybe
You don't have to worry
Or wonder whether or not
Reality is in this life
Because, either way
You can create your own fate.
I am so grateful for having such a wonderful daughter... More >
|
|
|
|
 5 May 2003 @ 17:51, by ming. Philosophy
What if I'm not a bag of skin? What if I'm not a spirit stuck in the head of such a bag of skin? Nor its brain. Nor its collection of thoughts?
The explanation I'm most used to is that I'm a spirit who temporarily resides in a body, and who moves on to other lives. I didn't believe in being a brain since I was a teenager, before I started looking around and questioning things.
But I'm not sure any of those answers are good enough for me any longer. Even the explanation of being an immortal spirit who jumps around from life to life, that's a little too simplistic and limiting in some ways. Oh, I have plenty of experiences to back it up, but it is not enough.
Logically, as well as intuitively, the ultimate answer can only be that I'm everything, the metaverse, all-that-is, God, whatever you call it. Any explanation that is built on a model of your identity being inherently separate from everything else eventually falls apart. There's just no proof of it. Fundamentalist religions, including the religion of scientific materialism, would like to tell you otherwise. You're a separate and powerless little thing, subject to the whims of a vengeful god, or to the cruel randomness of a meaningless and empty universe. The simplest answer to many puzzles is the connectedness of everything. Fundamental separation requires complicated and fanciful explanations, along the lines of "turtles all the way down". No, whatever I am is some kind of wave, or particle, in the quantum sea. And ultimately, any idea of my identity being anything less than that whole sea would be just a temporary convenience.
But that doesn't help me either. Or maybe it does in a way I don't understand. But I'm looking for the stuff in-between. I'm looking for a better way of understanding what and who I am. A practical way that will be more helpful as our world is accelerating and becoming increasingly multi-dimensional.
I can talk very down-to-earth about that. Technology and societal changes force all of us to move faster and be more multi-tasking. Information overload, instant satisfaction, the global village. But I think all of that is only the surface manifestations of something much bigger. We're evolving. Not just as a cute metaphor, but for real.
Despite far out discoveries in science, quantum mechanics, string theory, 12 dimensional universes, etc, we still go around pretending that the world is the same. Even if you're a scientist, your personal instincts haven't gotten any further than the science of Newton. You instinctively understand gravity and acceleration and movement in 3 dimensions. You have absolutely no instincts about 12 dimensional multi-verses where everything is in a quantum state that depends on everything else, and time is just another fungible dimension, which can run backwards, forwards or sideways. So the easiest is just to close your eyes and pretend it is just some cute, weird theory which doesn't have any bearing on real life. No, its the other way around. The Real World probably IS that weird. And we're largely living in a fantasy world. Or, more kindly, just one particular instantiation of centillions of possibilities. Trying to believe it is the only one is the crazy part. You know, that our game here is the only interesting thing in the multi-verse, and it all rotates around our little 3rd rate planet here.
I suspect our evolution will involve an increased intuitive awareness of some of those weird quantum physics principles. Exactly what, I don't know. I'm still a confused 3 1/2 dimensional human.
Biologically each of us is obviously a "we". A sophisticated cooperative of millions of smaller beings. Each of our cells is already a cooperative of thousands of smaller life forms. So a human body is a pretty huge socialist commune. Does that mean I need to operate as if I'm the elected head of state of this whole organization? Maybe. Maybe I should let the biology run itself, as it runs pretty well without me worrying too much about it. But maybe I'm really another kind of "we". A collection of all the different roles I'm playing. Or, more drastic, maybe all versions of me in many parallel dimensions need to coordinate their actions in some fashion.
Maybe it is more simple, and the real me is just a certain .. feeling, a vibe, a certain quality of how things are done. Maybe I don't have to worry about how I get around, or how I'm packaged, how I'm identified, or whether I understand the cosmology of it all. Maybe I'm just a very unique way of doing things. Maybe I'm just a way of perceiving things. Maybe I'm just the awareness of a certain pattern of information. Maybe I will wake up 5 universes away, if the sun just strikes the trees in the exact right way on a misty spring morning. Maybe I'm already there. More >
|
|
|
|
5 May 2003 @ 14:43, by sharie. Communication
I always wanted to be able to write a great love letter...
and a great love song...
one that would express my deepest love and appreciation...
I get the feeling nobody here is really interested in love.
I'm shocked and stunned and startled by the intensity of the anger being expressed. If only people had the same intense feeling of love, if only they'd realize that nobody else is going to create their experience but themselves...
if they want to waller in anger, frustration, insults, misery, finger pointing, complaining... it's all a mystery to me, but it's certainly their right if they choose.
I suppose they're angry at the state of the world AND at what's going on in their personal lives AND they're angry at their parents - or lack thereof - AND they're angry at their children - or lack thereof - AND they're angry at their partner - or lack therof - AND they're angry at themselves... OR they're just angry at me that I would dare to say "thanks, but no thanks" ...
maybe they haven't figured out the choice is theirs.
I don't care to carry around that kind of anger, I've felt it, I don't want it... I've been through more hell than most anybody that's left livin' - except for Kay - and she's not wallerin' in anger either, so it's no mystery that it's all about choice.
Sure, we can choose to be angry, seething through our teeth, pretending we're trapped and helpless. I'm not going to pretend somebody has that kind of power over me, because it would be an absolute lie.
I know that what I experience is my own making and I have no desire to waller in misery. Been there, done that. Twelve years ago my doctor told me I was dying, I was being eaten alive by every micro-organism that passed my way, and people were stealing money from me and anything else they could get their hands on, the doctors were lying, the lawyers were lying... everybody was "pissed off". What a hellhole. I don't care to be eaten alive anymore, especially not by my own anger... and certainly not by anybody else's anger either. I say, "no" and "no thanks". It's my choice, no question.
I don't think anger gives me a power position or makes me a righteous rebel. I can see right through myself, and I wouldn't dare be that phoney.
I'm happy. The angry people are probably "pissed off" at that too.
whoop-ti-doo
|
|
|
|
 4 May 2003 @ 03:26, by ming. Personal Development
Seems to me we humans are changing in more profound ways than we might readily notice. Most of us are no longer living in the same kind of world.
Earlier, a few hundred years ago, or even 50 years ago, life was more simple and coherent. You have a certain job, and you manage life by doing what you're doing. If you were Joe the Blacksmith, your life was pretty much defined by what you did. It might have been hard and full of suffering and struggle, but it wasn't mental struggle. It was clear what you did, and what role you played, and it was continuous and coherent. You played that role all day. Even when you were off you were still Joe the Blacksmith. OK, closer to our own time, you might have several roles sequenced linearly. At work 9-5 you're Joe the Insurance Salesman, and when you get home you're Joe the Family Father. One thing at a time. All you need to do to do it well is to be present for it, and do the few tasks required of you.
If you live in the "developing" world, in an oldfashioned way, you might still be living your life being in the same role all the time. And you probably wouldn't be reading this. If you live in a westernized country, you might possibly have managed to stay in an arrangement where you focus fullheartedly on your job during the day, and then you go home to your family, and it is still simple and straightforward.
But more and more people are no longer living straightforward linear lives. What makes the difference is in part our communication technologies. We carry cell phones and beepers. We have e-mail, instant messengers. But it is also what we do mentally and emotionally. We increasingly live abstractly or virtually, interacting with stuff that isn't physically here.
I live in a house with some other people. There's plenty to do. I could work in the yard, clean up, read my books, relate with these other people. I could spend all my time doing that, and in the "oldfashioned" way of life, that's what I would be doing. It might have been a farm, and all my attention would be spent on the work and activities going on here in this physical space. But now, today, I spend maybe 10% of my energy on what is going on right here. The rest is scattered across a much larger space, both geographically and more abstractly.
I perceive myself as having a long list of obligations to people in various areas. I work for money for people in several places, and I almost never see them. They aren't here, yet I feel quite a pressure of doing things for them. Part of that work involves keeping an eye on a whole bunch of things that aren't here either. Servers, e-mails, relations to a whole bunch of other people I don't see.
I have shared projects with more people, just as scattered geographically. I have a more or less abstract relation to hundreds or thousands of people who either read what I write, or who use programs I've written, or who participate in spaces I've set up.
Much of this has similar characteristics and importances as activities I would previously have done right here. They represent jobs, callings, obligations, quests, friendships, community. But yet they're lacking the natural boundaries that previously would have regulated such things.
If I were living in a small village and I was doing physical work, there would be certain obvious natural boundaries. I can't work more than 24 hours per day. I can't have a conversation with much more than one person at a time. If I'm shoeing Jack's horse, it is obvious to everybody that I'm not doing all sorts of other things. If you come to my shop and I'm not there, then obviously I'm not there and you'll either wait for me, or come back another time.
But our virtual and abstract relationships don't easily respect such boundaries. They all tend towards consuming all time and space. They would, at least sub-consciously, tend to expect you to provide your full attention 24 hours per day. Which is becoming increasingly impossible.
I work for several different companies. They're mostly pleasant to work with, but they don't have much awareness of each other, so each will tend towards expecting me to work for them 24 hours per day. Oh, they'll wait a few minutes if I have another call, but they're never going to understand what else I'm doing.
Most people who call on the phone will expect me to answer and to actually be available to talk with them when I do. Most people who send me an e-mail will expect I have time to read it and answer it. Most people who come by will expect I have time to talk with them. My family expects that I'm always there, to have dinner, fix a boo-boo, or clean up in the garage.
Maybe I'm particularly bad at setting boundaries. But I doubt it is just me. I'm living at least a dozen lives. But yet I haven't been granted any more hours in the day. I'm being torn in many directions. My time is sliced up, juggling many different priorities and commitments, either at the same time, or in successive time slices.
It frequently makes me stressed, or confused. I'm not sure if I'm longing for simpler times, or I'm longing for a new evolutionary capacity of my brain, or if I'm just badly organized. Maybe all of the above.
In the "old" days it was easy to remember who you were, because the world didn't change very much. Everybody would remind you who you are, and if you simply did the work that appeared on your doorstep, life was simple. In our busy fragmented world, that's no longer any practical strategy.
Of the several directions of answers I see, one is to gain a much higher degree of awareness of who you are and how you do things. Not your title or your work or your obligations. But the specific quality you add to everything you do. Your brand. Maybe you haven't discovered it yet, and you need to. Maybe you kind of know, but it has been forgotten. But, one way or another, there's a need for finding who you are, separate from all the other stuff. Only then might you have a better chance of choosing what to get involved in, and what not. And there is a chance that you will actually do all of it in a consistent and coherent way, where you're actually in alignment with yourself, even though you're wearing many hats.
Another angle is to discover a different kind of awareness. A group awareness rather than an individual awareness. You're doing a whole bunch of things, in a whole bunch of different contexts. That is kind of like being a whole bunch of individuals. That can still work. You can be a swarm. An ant hill, a school of fish, or maybe rather a whole eco system. Many diverse pieces that relate with each other in a synergetic way. Instead of staying in the illusion that you're one person doing one thing, accept that you're now a movement of diverse pieces. The rules for a movement or an eco system are drastically different from the rules an individual might live by. A whole new volabulary to learn.
The world looks deceptively like it used to. The sun comes up in the morning, and you put clothes on, and eat, and gravity works like it always did. Yet, this is only a small portion of the world you live in now. You live many parallel lives. They need to learn to co-exist peacefully, if they don't already. Many independently moving pieces can very well exist in harmony, and a new kind of order can emerge. More >
|
|
|
|
 3 May 2003 @ 16:13, by ming. Communication
Some people are having a discussion about whether and how language shapes how we experience the world. Stavros the Wonder Chicken has a very long post examining different academic models, and using Korean as an example. And David Weinberger has an excellent post talking about Heidegger.
I enjoy philosophical discussions, and I particularly enjoy examining how world views are constructed. But I guess I have somewhat limited patience with academics, and I'm not overly educated in traditional philosophy. I tend to be most interested in examining other models to possibly improve on the model I already have, and I have little interest in models that are more limited than my own, even if they are maybe of historical interest.
Anyway, I find it quite obvious that people being native speakers of different languages see the world a bit different. Western languages tend to construct sentences out of subjects and objects. That creates a certain separation between things, which doesn't necessarily exist, but which makes native speakers of for example English often believe that they can say things really precisely in their language. And because the sentences fit together well, and seem to fit with each other, they often end up with the misguided belief that their language provides a complete description of physical phenomena. Which is borderline insane, in my view.
I've noticed how Chinese or Japanese speakers often will make certain consistent mistakes in English. Like mixing up singular and plural. Some people figure it out eventually, but some people never do. For an English speaker it is obvious that noodles is plural, because there are many noodles on a plate. A Chinese person is just as likely to call it "noodle", not because he can't count, but because he's seeing it differently. I suppose focusing on the substance, not on the individual pieces. A Korean person leading a Yoga class might say "Touch your left feet". I only have one left foot, but in Korean thinking it makes sense that he's talking to the group, and there obviously are a whole bunch of left feet there. The English speaker will be very focused on himself individually, whereas a Korean will think more as a group.
From what I understand here, a couple of linguistic researchers, Sapir and Whorf, are major proponents of the idea that language shapes our world. There are various degrees of that. Like whether the language absolutely and inescapably shapes our world view, or whether it just influences it greatly. And others again disagree altogether.
I think many humans, many scientific types in particular, have a great fear of admitting that they live within a certain world view, which isn't just The Way Things Are. Particularly it is difficult to admit that what you perceive around you isn't the real world at all, but only a vague approximation and interpretation of a very narrow band of what is really there. Quantum mechanics should have revealed that, but the realization hasn't yet crept into our way of thinking. In part because we still speak the same way.
I think we should learn general semantics in school. Alfred Korzybski's Science and Sanity is still one of the most important books I've read, even though it is a very difficult read. The map is not the territory. The word is not the thing. More >
|
|
|
|
 2 May 2003 @ 23:59, by ming. Alternative Money Systems
One of the reasons I initially connected with Britt's talk of Xpertweb is that a few years ago I was also working on figuring out how to make a new kind of infrastructure that might help ordinary folks interact economically in a generative way. Julie Solheim and I were working on what we called the Chalice Network. Some of the positioning we used makes me cringe a bit today, and some of the explanations are a bit naive, but, hey, it was directed at an L.A. new agey crowd. Not to try to insult anybody. Anyway, one of the reasons it didn't happen is probably that I didn't quite succeed in getting the formulas worked out right. Another reason is that it wasn't peer-to-peer. It was a centralized thing one had to sign up for. As opposed to something that could spread pretty much by itself. Regardless, there were some key points made in the Chalice Network, which would be useful to bring up here.
People operate economically in many different modes and have different motivations. Some people are focusing on making money. Some people have certain goods, and want different goods, and are looking to trade. Some people focus mainly on choosing where they can best provide their services freely, to achive the best possible result. Which mode people are in might have something to do with how abundant they feel, but not necessarily with how wealthy they are. Rich people might well be very focused on making more money, and poor people might very well be focused on giving things away.
To serve several kinds of economic needs, the Chalice Network was envisioned to have three levels, or three entirely different ways of interacting economically. Anybody could exist in all three, but it is quite likely that a given person would find one of them to be the best fit. We gave each of these realms a romantic name, as follows:
Realm 1 - The "Avalon" Level - Free giving and receiving. You can choose what services and resources you would be willing to give freely to others, to what extent, and under what circumstances.
Realm 2 - The "Round Table" Level - Local Exchange System. You can exchange services and resources with others without any need for involving money. An accounting system allows you to use services that you need and to provide services where they are required, as long as the inflow and outflow remains fairly balanced.
Realm 3 - The "Castle" Level - Network Representation System. You can list services or resources you will provide for monetary exchange. You can also choose to act as an agent representing the services of others in the network, in exchange for monetary compensation. In other words, you can promote the services of others in the network to anyone you choose, and you will receive percentages of sales. In addition you will receive Local Exchange credit for using this system, whether it be as a provider or as a representative.
It would all be a directory of people offering certain services. They could take three drastically different kinds of payment. In Realm 3, the "lowest" level, we're talking about regular dollars, yen, euros, etc. People sell stuff to each other. And there's a system of pre-negotiated percentages that can be given as commission to others who help make exchanges happen. There was a bit of a multi-level thing there, to motivate people who are money-motivated.
Realm 2 would be a LETS system, i.e. exchanges would happen in an invented local currency, acting as a medium in barter exchanges. If you need something, you would be able to buy it, even if you don't have any dollars, as long as your account stays fairly balanced.
Realm 1 would be a gift economy. There would be a directory of services or goods available for free, and under what terms and conditions.
The hidden agenda was that people would be gradually magnetized towards Level 1. They might start by just wanting to sell stuff, but if they do well and the economic velocity increases, the dollars will matter less, but they still want some accounting, and some assurances that participants have balanced accounts. And if everybody gets used to easily and rapidly providing or consuming a greater and greater variety of services, eventually we might not even bother to count, but might just focus on most efficiently making useful services available as widely as possible.
Where I got stuck in the design was in how to build in an incentive for people in the money level to move on to the more ethereal accounting methods. I had some kind of bonus points in mind, but then it is a tricky problem how to make the accounting in each of the levels balance in and of themselves.
Anyway, back to what this has to do with Xpertweb. Xpertweb is at first glance like the third level described above. People offer stuff for sale, and there are various opportunities for building a business on brokering the information in the network. E.g. bring together some people who couldn't find each other before, or arrange cheap health insurance for everybody.
But, potentially, if the infrastructure building blocks are done well enough, the data structures and protocols are flexible enough, and the whole thing is distributed enough so that nobody controls it - these various economic approaches might simply be ways that people use the same basic pieces. Nothing would have to be inherently different if you want to pay your bill in Ithaca Hours or in Coconuts. You'd still want to be sure you're getting what you were looking for. Nothing would be inherently different if you were giving your service or your goods away. If your goods were scarce you would probably want to carefully compare the prospective recipients, and give your goods either to those who, according to their history, would make the most of it, or at least to those whom it would do the most good.
In other words, you can always make better choices if you have a good picture of the reputation and past history of everybody involved. No matter if it is dollars or good will that is flowing through the system, it will flow much better when it is no longer directed blindly. More >
|
|
<< Newer entries Page: 1 ... 223 224 225 226 227 ... 279 Older entries >> |
|
These are news items gathered or contributed by NCN members
|
Categories
Activism (97)
Altered States (32)
Alternative Money Systems (17)
Broadcasting, Media (20)
Business (19)
Children, Parenting (28)
Communication (63)
Communities (71)
Conspiracy (34)
Counseling, Psychology (23)
Crime, Policing (7)
Death & Dying (14)
Developing World (19)
Economics, Financing, Banking (51)
Education (34)
Energy Sources (19)
Engineering (1)
Entrepreneurs, Money Making (19)
Environment, Ecology (123)
Exercise, Fitness (1)
Extraterrestrials (27)
Farming (14)
Futurism (13)
Globalization (29)
Government, Public Sector (46)
History, Ancient World (38)
Housing, Building, Architecture (10)
Ideas, Creativity (318)
Internet (49)
Inventions (6)
Investigation, Intelligence (23)
Knowledge Management (21)
Legal, Justice (24)
Liberty, Sovereignty (14)
Medicine, Healthcare (46)
Music (30)
Natural Health & Healing (27)
Neighborhood (12)
Networking (19)
Nutrition, Cooking (7)
Old Age, Retirement (4)
Organizational Development (12)
Paranormal (12)
Peace (35)
Performing Arts (9)
Personal Development (80)
Philosophy (94)
Politics (120)
Poverty (4)
Preparedness, Self-Reliance (12)
Privacy, Security (1)
Publishing (3)
Recreation, Fun (59)
Relationships (19)
Religion (40)
Science (48)
Sexuality (16)
Shared Purpose (30)
Social System Design (47)
Space Exploration (23)
Spirituality (391)
Systems Thinking (31)
Technology (37)
Transportation (9)
Travel (22)
Violence, War (103)
Visual Arts, Graphics (63)
|
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|
|
|
|
|
1 |
2 |
3 |
| 4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
| 11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
| 18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
| 25 |
26 |
27 |
28 |
29 |
30 |
|
Members can post news items and comments in the member area.
Information and opinions are the responsibility of the posters and do not represent any official position of NCN. Please do your own verification and make up your own mind.
Syndication
|
|
