Human organizations that mirror the structure of SAFE?

Yes, It is a wonderful new form of slavery because one cannot sell their share to pursue other interests. You are stuck on the family farm forever. Weather it is your calling or not.

It is a really aweful idea. And I work almost entirely with cooperatives. People can come and go – they can sell their share – They can move from one cooperative to another.

The thing about the American farm at least is that Generally it stays in the family – one sibling will inherit land, the other the operation, the yet another a related service… These aren’t greedy assholes – they are very hard working people. They form corporations because that is what they are-- The also do co-operatives. Both have advantages and disadvantages - but telling somebody they cannot sell out of one career to pursue another is tyranical like most things @warren proposes.

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@jreighley that’s nonsense, if you divest it just goes back to others in the cooperative. And once vested usually 5 years you still get your prorated retirement even if you leave. It would be just like leaving a credit union but it wouldn’t be an investment based retirement so payment might begin on the retirement the moment one left regardless of age for life. there would be no cash out option and it would only be transferable to a surviving spouse. or minor children the if both parents die and only until the children reach the age of majority.

What this cuts out is greedy speculation. Trying to generate money for outside parasites who don’t contribute anything except the harassment and manipulation and for the supposed risk of unneeded silver spoon capital. No thanks. There are different ways to structure these things but getting rid of the conflicts of interest with the proper cooperative charter is the clear way forward.

Prortated retirement is wage earner talk.

It so no use to me if I want to leave my current employment and start a real estate practice or Coffee business that will cost me 200k - 400k in start up expenses.

People don’t aspire to be slaves to the system, even if it is the kinder gentler Warren system that is keeping them from using their assets as they wish to pursue their dreams.

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Again nonsense. It is still a share its just more political powerful and not subject to silly economic speculation. The members collectively own the thing once they vest but the never divest and collect a retirement from the moment they leave. But in a DACO there is no board or execs or managers or supervisors. Its flat. Almost seems like guild logic in a way but that’s feudal era or before. But it is the opposite of slavery. Nothing binds you and the pay off will be much higher. Only you and your compatriots have your hands in the pot.

Such organizations would likely prefer trade with other such democratic organizations.

You are telling me that i cannot sell what I have worked hard to build at the time that I choose to sell it…

That isn’t nonsense. It is what you said.

There are really good reasons why people choose to divest from one life and invest in another. You are proposing preventing that, at least in any useful timeframe.

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Not at all, you get your money the moment you leave. I don’t think you should be able to take the organization’s guess about average life expectancy because that might short change you. But if you wanted the higher of the two what ever that turned out to be, that seems fine. But making the share itself heritable beyond what was mentioned above would run counter to matching compensation to contribution and invite useless speculative influence and money stripping.

You said no trading. How do you know what my share is worth if it cannot be traded?

Are you really going to sell 10% of your tractors and ladders to pay me off? That could undermine the whole operation… If it is a co-op it isn’t going to have a ton of cash sitting around to be given away at a moment’s notice.

Its just a pipe dream. Silly. Pipe dream.

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Not at all. There is no speculation, divide up by the book value if need be, there is no market value. Point is to avoid ownership games and the conflicts they create. Cooperatives work, not all are small, Mondragon is 24 billion a year. The DACO type that automates away the board, execs, managers and supervisors eliminates a lot of overhead and its a natural match for a cooperative.

Almost seems a bit like a union, no one actually owns it, if it were liquidated it would go to the members or maybe charity.

Where are you going to raise the 400k you owe me when I pull out?

Cooperatives do not work in the way you describe. I know… I implement co-operative accounting software for a living.

You are adding a bunch of political BS to what a cooperative is to make it suit your pipe dream. It is a business arrangement, not some political social justice crusade. It is often a good business arrangement, but not if you bind it up with a bunch of rules and restrictions, banning all kinds of behaviors for political reasons…

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Eliminating conflicts is a good idea. Sounds like its time for you to update your wares. As for the 400k, that is within the means of a big cooperative like Mondragon. But 400k might short change you. At 20 years the aim should be level income replacement and 400k wouldnt do that.

As for restriction, these are not restrictions the are ways of cutting out what becomes money sucking bs and risk loading.

In the beginning in a venture like SAFE itself the core team isnt going to sabotage the effort with greed, greed is not the point quite the contrary. And if they were really a good fit they stay through a career as there is no need to run every five years. They also have autonomy and control.

But obviously the simple backwards ownership games that are at the heart of corporatism won’t apply. You’ll get a good living, have more autonomy, control and respect. You’ll be rebuilding the middle class and be helping to eliminate the capitalist class. The middle class is the only one we need and that middle class can be as well off as we need it to be.

So again the point isn’t to sustain or rebuild Wall st with trader speculator concerns or even play games with business brokers.

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Most cooperatives aren’t going to be massive conglomerates. They are going to be groups of 30 -100 partners. They are not going to have 400k laying around and are not going to be able to cash out on a moments notice…

How do you know an ounce of what your are saying?

I work in the industry, I know how coops work, I and I am certain that you are making it up off the top of your head, and have not every worked for one, in one or seen the books of one. I have worked for 30 or more. In the accounting end of things and the operation end of things…

Cooperatives are a very good business model… Many people choose them and do pretty well. Others don’t and also do very well. They have their own political BS that sometimes makes them do imprudent things. They still have boards that are controlled by people operating in their own best interest. If it was happy nirvana, people would stay forever, but the fact of the matter is that people move from one to another and often to the for-profit competitors all of the time.

It is good enough to compete as it stands, but after you get done wiith adding all of your tyranny, it will not be able to compete.

Don’t make stuff up. Cite some sources… Like i said I have worked in co-ops for a long time…

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You’re going to have to step up your game and empty your cup. You can read Democracy in the Work place by Wolff if you like, I think that is next on my list but I already know from his comments that rotation through hierarchical structures won’t cut it. I think your interests brought you to SAFE to retool. You may have been involved with coops since your days in hippy communes and may have since grown jaded to the point if being right of center but a new day is dawning. Its full of stuff like iCEO and SAFE and Watson Debator. Its got people like @MrAnderson and @philip_rhoades interested in SAFE and the DACO concept. My preferred acronym at the moment but Mr. Daniel Suarez and @MrAnderson introduced me to the concept.

You seem to be an expert in the model, or part of it, that got us to a point where a billion people or 1in 7 are involved in coops and where even in the resistant US 1/32 if the economy is a result. Have some faith in what seems to be your life’s work. What you were working on looks like the key to the next stage.

Now to your nuts and bolts questions. As an outsider I don’t have confidence in the rotation model suggested by Wolff. I like the off the top of my head model of at willing and divesting the hierarchy to balance power but find @MrAnderson comments persuasive and like his approach much better. Id also note that while Mondragon has had an incredibly tough economic environment to navigate in its home of country Spain, I find it a but worrying that it felt the need to marry USX. Also coops of about 100 as the mainstay of the economy may be an ideal but until the money resides in the middle class it may be more challenging.

And if we are grown ups way may have need to mentor or be a men-tee or be part of an apprenticeship but we don’t need supervisors or to be endlessly billed or in debt to pigs which amounts to two sides of the same coin.

It is absolutely ridiculous to propose "no trading’ after the cryptocurrency revolution. Anyone can make up a security with 8 or 9 clicks. That isn’t going to uninvented.

All in all, I think everything warren proposes reeks of authoritarian tyranny. Anybody who claims to know the best way for everyone to organize their business and then attempts to force them into restructuring is a tyrant.

It won’t work. The anarchists are winning… Technology is going to tie the hands of government and free markets to operate freely.

I don’t have any problem at all with cooperatives – They are often a good idea, and ought to happen way more often than they do… But they are not a fit for everything. They work well where things are fairly predictable and operations are consistant year to year. They generally are not very bold in innovation or creating new markets or new products… Risk taking requires a bold leader, and usually that isn’t flow out of group consensus. Where I see co-ops succeed in such regard they usually do have a very strong leader who has control – and they tend not to operate too much differently than any other corporation. With all of the bells and whistles folks like Warren hate.

I’ve seen plenty of cutthroat sneaky underhanded business dealing within co-ops. It isn’t anything near a 'fix all"… It’s just another business arrangement.

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Oh yes we need the glorification of personality and the strong leader to lead the sheep.

SAFE itself is a counter example to what you’ve laid out. Where is the top down hierarchy? The unversity model is another. I dont know if it still holds but there was a organization at Stanford for a while where 100 phds put out more and more relevant patents than the next 10000 phds at corporates.

And as for your other points the overriding concern is democracy at work and not the efficiency of effectiveness or profit level for trading parasites. The prosperity that Americans have generated has been outright stolen from them. We can get rid of corporatism and the thieving. Nothing says people have to do it this way but its clearly better than what has come before (because that isnt working and seems proven now to be a dead end) just as credit unions are a radically better idea than private banks.

SAFE would not exist without a strong leader… No “Lets earn a paycheck” co-op would say “gee lets toss out all the code and switch to rust, a promising language that isn’t even to 1.0 release yet.”

It would never happen.

You can have a strong leader within a co-op. But they are going to be able to operate the co-op in a way that the big guns agree with and the little guys may or may not. They are going to be able to massage things to keep the people who they want to keep happy happy at the expense of the members that are less critical…

You can not have a strong leader, and you will be able to continue day to day operations for a certain period of time – but you are unlikely to evolve as the industry evolves, and many of your members will migrate to co-operatives that have made the bold moves and are more successful as a result. Hierarchy often succeeds as a business model. If it didn’t the market wouldn’t tolerate it.

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Except that SAFE is already set up like a coop. And explain Linux, its slowly taking over. Was Torvalds a strong corporatist.

Its the third plank of twelve for the strongest US presidential candidate on the left. No one on the right has a clue about anything aside from vaccines and abortions, so coops loom large in our future. In the UK its looking like Blair may stand trial for war crimes and maybe that means we can get Bush and the neocons for 911. This is all an indictment of corporatism.

Under Regan and Bush style corporatism public schools got so bad it was all about assigning Fs to soft criminalize anyone with spine and culling out the excellent sheep with As all to protect the corporat thugs. Under R&B corporatism they’d fire your children into the street and under boss sponsored blackballing you have to go back and blow the former offended tyrant to get to feed your kids. Under corporatism the average worker doesn’t see a fifth of what they work for. They go to a sweat shop where they live in costant fear of being out on the street and suffer endless humiliation and degradation. And if they or their children get sick they face total ruin and even losing their children. Corporatism is bs and its over, its run its course.

There are plenty of “benevolent dictators for life” in the open source movement… Some good, some bad.
They are still “benevolent dictators for life” though. The fact that they organize their business in a particular way does not make them immune from corruption, and it certainly doesn’t make them democratic.

How many Open source companies does Oracle own now? Remember Caldera Linux (Eventually just became a shell company to sue other linux users…?

It isn’t a paradise. Co-ops are just as cutthroat as any other business. Its a dog eat dog wold and they don’t enjoy being eaten any more than anyone else? Many of my co-ops are also run by “benevolent dictators for life” Some good, some evil. Yes, they are elected to their position but they are the ones inviting the members, they choose who to cow-tow to, and who to show the door. So all in all, it isn’t really any sort of paradise politically. It is just as brutal as any other business…

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No worries if this thread is enjoyed by the two of you, but remember that experts can only tell you how you can’t do something. @Warren you seem to have a focus on your passion and see a way to do it better. You will never convince the people who you talk about replacing with a computer.

The only solution in changing the world in that way is to build what you have in-visioned and set the stage for the younger generations that will make the decisions very soon. I think @jreighley has very good concerns and should be helpful in describing what the challenges will be for your vision @Warren, because I think @jreighley echoes the thoughts of concern for many baby-boomers/seniors. Imagine you believing what you were told your whole life and worked yourself to the bone and when your time finally came to collect your carrot/retirement it vanished. Unfortunately IMO the majority of older generations are not ever going to retire, they can’t; at least in the US.

@Warren you are right there are a lot of things that could have been different and/or better, but the silver lining is it gives you an opportunity to do it.

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If I could give the post 3 hearts I would.

Okay here you go off the rails again. If you need money, say $10, and I have $10 and agree you the money you need with a $2 interest THAT IS NOT THEFT! That is an investment on my part and a short term profit on yours. You are risking that the short term money increase will allow you to make enough money to pay back the additional money you need to pay back the loan with interest. There is no theft involved. And yes that IS a contribution to society. Loaning people money is just as much a contribution to society as someone offering out their skills or selling raw resources. TANSTAFL Warren.

So what rule by data instead? Money = power. Crypto = power. Data = power. Let’s stop mincing words here whatever the form here be it physical resources, information resources, financial resources or political resources it’s all the same thing: power. And you would what? Violate someone’s consent or rob them because they died? A man is about to die so he gives everything he owns to his son. What’s the difference between that and writing a will? But in Warrenland you feel you have the right to tell others what they can do with their own property. Which in turn would make it YOUR property not theirs which would put you, the state, in control of everything. He who controls a thing, or more precisely can destroy a thing, owns it.

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