Prior to the break I took from writing, I was up to 62,000 words in a plan for a single book, which may only have constituted as much as 10% of the finished book; but now on returning to writing, I’ve split the project into 4 books, about half that previous writing was pushed off towards books 2 & 3 ( nothing started on book 4 as yet ), and the other half was kept for book 1, but restructured and rewritten.
Update – Tuesday 19th Dec. 2017
Back to writing ( finally ) … I’ve got Scrivener installed ( on trial ), and it seems like vastly better writing software, but I’m looking forward to seeing version 3 for Windows once it comes out … so off we go again!
Technical and related updates – 15th December 2017
Ok, after weeks of frustration … here’s the result:
- The sales guy either misunderstood my extremely plainly worded question, OR ( more likely ) lied to cover up his lack of knowledge &/or in fear of losing the sale … so no, my laptop cannot do GPU passthrough ( like a Razer gaming laptop ) without either writing some seriously clever upgrades to the UEFI BIOS and firmware, OR by getting an eGPU ( external GPU ) rig for connection via Thunderbolt ports ( which would be another $2,000 – which is a non-starter for my budget );
- I can only install Windows 7 directly by doing a very clever modification of intel microcode using information published for Linux developers, plus a tool published by VMWare … so that’s a whole bunch of time and effort I can’t be bothered with;
- Thus I have returned ( unfortunately ) to Windows 10.
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Entertainment and Hospitality industries in an Open Empire
As you should be aware – if you’ve read enough of this site – industries don’t just disappear in the vision I propose, but simply the motivations for them and agendas they pursue will change … hospitality is no different. So I was thinking that perhaps some of you might be wondering:
“will I still be able to go to a cafe / restaurant, or see a live band perform, if capitalism collapses and is replaced by a non-property/trade/currency-based economic paradigm?”
… the answer is most definitely yes, and I’ll explain how it would most likely work.
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Natural state of being
I’ve read several people recently claiming that “poverty is the natural state of human beings”, and I’m not sure if this is new bullshit or just old bullshit being rehashed, but I am sure it is bullshit … allow me to explain.
Humans are just another mammal, that’s all we are, and prior to the invention of the gun and the industrial revolution, lets have a look at what was going on with our various species of sentient mammalian cousins.
Input efficieny: consumption per unit of consumption
If we were to make a generic unit of resource, such that all units of energy, matter, space, and time could be converted to this standard unit, we could more easily analyse how efficient our processes are. I’ve written a couple of articles over the last few weeks about this ( just have a look back through the blog roll ), but I want to in this article discuss the general concept of efficiency itself from an input resource perspective.
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Business transition to the Open Empire framework
Imagine you have a successful business within the capitalist economic system, but at the same time this new paradigm has been up and running for a while, and so you decide you’d like to experiment with a single project run via this new framework to see how it will go by comparison to the usual way of doing things. Or perhaps you want to know where your skills will be of use in a post transition Resources Based Economy.
This article is a hypothetical scenario of how that might play out for a few different circumstances ( both during and after transition ), just to give you an idea.
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5 elements of systemic scarcity: objectives, process, resources, temporal, and spatial
This article originally came to me as an idea about how to simply distinguish the differences between property/trade/currency vs. non-property/trade/currency based economic systems – being that the former manufactures scarcity, while the latter removes it ( where possible ). Which in turn was inspired by a debate on social media about whether or not the world is over populated, what we mean by that, and how/why we justify such a statement.
It then occurred to me that for people to understand these issues, they must first understand what scarcity is, and how it occurs – ironically, the people who understand this the least are often the ones who should understand it the best ( economists ), and yet it’s quite apparent that many of them haven’t a clue. The reason for that being, scarcity is an ecological issue, but not an economic one within the confines of the capitalist economic paradigm ( though it should be ).
So let’s start at the beginning and look at what scarcity actually is.
techno-permaculture: civilisation planning
First of all, let me begin this article by stating that I hate the word “pest” to describe POLLINATORS ( which is what many insects are, not just bees ), or to describe whatever else might be in your garden, orchard, or crop fields. I only use this word ( “pest” ) because it best grabs the attention of those whom I want to reach, and hopefully influence to change their practices with respect to “pest control” – particularly in agriculture – but more broadly this article is about the planning of a sustainable civilisation by a marriage of technology and permaculture on many levels.
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What happens to greed?
There’s a lot of valid questions I’ve been asked about my work and the vision it expresses, although these questions are usually asked in a very poor – even invalid – format, so I have to reinterpret the question, in order to help the querent understand their own question, and therefore understand the answer.
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